


Orpheus in Freefall

by futurerae



Category: Back to the Future (Movies)
Genre: (don't worry it'll all be okay), AU of the first movie, Blood, Earn Your Happy Ending, Ghosts, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Grief/Mourning, Gun Violence, Implied Violence, M/M, Music, Orpheus and Eurydice Myth, Second Chances, Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Character Death, Terrorism, True Love, cheating death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-27
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-05-09 19:23:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 40,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5552246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futurerae/pseuds/futurerae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Marty McFly loses his dearest friend under tragic and mysterious circumstances, he despairs that there's nothing he can do to ever make things right again—until, in classic Marty fashion, he accidentally stumbles onto things unseen and discovers that there is more to life and death than he ever realized.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> PG-13 for swearing, implied/offscreen violence, blood, and minor suicidal ideation. Also, unapologetic Greek mythology coexisting with the modern world.
> 
> AU of the first movie. Buckle up, kids; this is an Orpheus-and-Eurydice retelling so things are gonna get really, really bad before they can start to get better.

* * *

_Thursday, October 24, 1985_  
9:47 PM

It's a cool night in Hill Valley, getting close to Halloween, and Emmett Brown has the lab all to himself. 

In one corner of the garage, the jukebox chugs along, gamely offering up one eclectic selection after another: Miles Davis, the Kinks, Sinatra, Bach, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Clash. The last one was put in at Marty's request during his brief angry music phase, when he'd been on the rocks with Jennifer and had taken to sneaking off with some of his sister's old, forgotten punk records to work through it. Marty's since moved on to more contemporary obsessions, and since he's gotten out from under a few bullies' thumbs and worked things out with Jennifer, the anger and abandonment worries have mostly dissipated. But whenever that particular record cues up, it conjures a sort of nostalgia for their early days working together that Emmett is usually grateful for.

 _All the times when we were close,_ the jukebox sings, _I'll remember these things the most—_

Emmett hums a little, puttering about, setting his video camera to rights after their rather extensive—and still largely unedited—documentation of his attempt at a hover engine last month. That puzzle's been dogging him, his own personal nemesis, since he was 17 years old. It isn't going to be solved any time soon, and it's been little more than an off-and-on diversion for the last thirty years anyway; he's had his mind on bigger things. Pulling the tape and tossing it carelessly aside, he can't honestly bring himself to care about the failure. 

Because tomorrow night—barring any last minute difficulties—oh, what a tape _that_ will make. If the flying transport has been his nemesis, what he's set to unveil tomorrow is his life's crowning achievement. Always better to fixate on the positive.

From the yard, he can hear Einstein barking; he'd thought he could let him out within the fence for a few minutes without him getting into any trouble, but there have been a lot of rabbits out and about the last few nights. He sets the camera aside, turns to look at the mess his dog feeder has made of Einstein's bowl in the week he's been gone. Considers cleaning it, and then considers _not_ cleaning it.

Eh. It can wait. A _lot_ of things can wait; tonight should be celebratory, light. Tonight should be a lot of things, maybe, but not a night for cleaning.

Then Einstein's barking takes on a panicked note, almost a wail—certainly more distressed than he should be over a few rabbits. Something in the music feels jarring, suddenly. Emmett furrows his brow.

 _So alone I keep the wolves at bay_ , despairs the anxious voice on the record, and when Emmett crosses the floor and pulls the door open and finds himself facing down the barrel of an aggressively aimed assault rifle, the only thought that has time to connect is: _Thank god I've kept Marty away this week_.

Then there's shouting in a foreign tongue and a few warning shots that go desperately wide; one of the bullets hits the jukebox, silencing the music in a spray of sparks, and then shoving and more yelling and more shots—and that's one mortal lifetime done with.

* *

_Friday, October 25, 1985_  
8:19 AM

"Hey, Doc? Doc!"

Marty drops the key back under the mat, a little concerned that he hadn't ended up needing it after all but hey, it's not like Doc's _never_ left the door unlocked before. It's not a great habit but it doesn't mean that anything's…

...wrong…

Marty feels the color drain out of his face, his mouth still pursed to whistle for Einstein in a summons he knows instantly would be in vain. His vision goes a little funny, swimming side to side, because oh, oh _god_.

The garage is a disaster, the walls riddled with holes, the furniture toppled and papers and books strewn around. Some of the clocks tick on, but many are shattered and still, silent. The air stinks of iron and fear, and there's blo—there's _something_ dark red and ominous, so goddamned much of it, just _everywhere_. Marty casts around desperately, looking for the exploded paint cans, the iodine bottles, the broken jars of spaghetti sauce, fucking _anything_ that could explain this away as something other than what it looks like because it's just a normal Friday morning, _was_ a normal morning, and he is not prepared for what this looks like.

And as far as he can see, there's no source for the ghoulish mess, and at first that's actually reassuring because sure, it _looks_ like a murder scene but normally you'd expect there to be a… a person, still there, right? And there isn't, which means that maybe— 

Then he happens to look down, sees the dark rusty trail running under his own feet and out the front door like something had been _dragged_ , and it's all he can do to right the waste basket at his knees, spilled dog food cans scattered across the floor, before he pitches over it to heave up everything he's ever eaten.

*

_My best friend is dead_.

Marty doesn't quite know where he is. He's been wandering for a while; he's lucid enough to know that he's on the sidewalk and not in the street, at least, which is something. A leash dangles from his hand, taken mindlessly from the peg by the door, because he has to find Einstein. He has to find Einstein because Doc cares about Einstein a lot and he will want to— _would_ want to know that he's— 

_My friend is dead_ , his head insists, a broken record that runs all over everything else. _He's dead, Doc's dead, how could this have happened these things only happen in movies not to real people and oh god, I have to find Einstein I have to find Doc he's dead he's dead_

He purses his lips, tries to whistle for Einstein, but all that comes out is a breathy wheeze.

"Einstein," he calls, weakly; a disconnected part of him almost wants to laugh because why would Einstein be _here_ , wherever here is? _I'm not going about this scientifically,_ he thinks, and then it's like he's been punched in the gut like used to happen during freshman year and he has to lean against the brick wall of the 7-11 and stuff his fist in his mouth just to not puke. _Again_. Not like there's anything left in there at this point, but that doesn't make bile taste any better.

"Einstein," he mumbles around the mouthful of knuckles, then: "... _doc_."

*

At some point, he finds himself standing in front of a payphone; thick, lazy graffiti slithers down one side of the enclosure. Not a great part of town. His fist tightens around the leash, still hanging unoccupied, and he thinks: _someone should call the police_.

He should have called the police. Should have done it hours ago, if there was to be any hope of finding out who—and _why_ — 

Crooking the handset between ear and shoulder, Marty tries to focus on the little Pacific Bell placard under the phone cradle, where the emergency numbers are listed. He doesn't want to just call 911, because that's for when there's still someone left to help. _Hill Valley Police Department,_ he finally finds, and punches the digits in numbly.

 _"Hill Valley non-emergency,"_ answers the dispatcher, and Marty knows he's supposed to say something, but he's having trouble figuring out what. _"...is someone there?"_ the dispatcher asks, and she sounds _nice_ , like somebody's aunt, like somebody's mother. 

"...my friend's dead," Marty finally says, because it's what's been stuck in his head for hours. He can feel the edge of the phone enclosure digging into his palm where he's gripping it. "Someone killed him, I don't know... and his dog's gone, I have to find him, someone has to help me—"

 _"Okay, honey, slow down,"_ the voice says. Marty takes a breath, hadn't realized he needed one. _"Where are you? Are you in danger?"_

Is _he_ in…? "No, no," he says, because that doesn't matter.

_"What's your name?"_

"Marty. Uh, McFly."

A brief pause, an urgent shuffling of papers in the background. _"Honey, you need to tell me where you are, okay? Your family has been calling, saying you're missing."_

"No, that's not why I'm—"

 _"I know, and some officers will talk to you about that, but dear, if someone's dead, there's nothing we can do for them. We need to make sure_ you're _safe, right now. Can you tell me where you are?"_

Nothing. There's nothing he can— 

_"Marty?"_ , the phone asks, imploring, tinny. _"Mr. McFly?"_

Marty hangs up the phone, woodenly, and sets off down the sidewalk. He has a lot of ground to cover, if he's going to find Einstein any time soon, and he knows how miserable the poor guy gets when he's missed breakfast.

*

The walk back to the Lyon Estates takes a very long time. He starts back when the sun starts going down; he doesn't arrive at the curb outside his house until the evening's well into night, the first lackluster stars poking holes through the clouds. He must have left his skateboard at the garage, dropped when he'd had to lurch for the trash can. His feet hurt a lot, he supposes, but it's not something that's really registering.

The screen door clatters shut behind him, too loud. The car's missing from the driveway. 

"...someone there?" comes his mother's voice from the kitchen, disbelieving and a little slurred. _Great,_ he thinks, _she's drinking, what else is new_ , but for the first time he honestly gets it, wishes a little bit that she'd share.

 _Alcohol at your age could damage your cognition substantially_ , he hears Doc lecture in his head, a memory from last summer when he'd been seeking the usual dumb teenager advice, though _lecture_ isn't the right word—it'd never felt judgmental. _I'm not your parents and I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I can't in good conscience advise it._

Marty thinks maybe he should be crying, isn't sure whether he is or isn't. There's just an emptiness behind his eyes, throbbing. 

"...mom?" he strains out, throat clamped shut around it.

The sound of a glass hitting the kitchen table, hard; it's dark in there. " _Marty!_ " his mother half shouts, coming around the corner at a clip. She's unsteady and looks like she wants to yell at him but then something in her face softens up and melts away, and she's got her arms around him and now he _is_ crying, making an ugly, wheezing mess of himself propped against her shoulder for as long as she'll let him.

*

"We were so worried, Marty," she says, and she's not mad yet but there's a sharpness still there in her voice, lurking. She's gotten him into a chair at the table, is fussing with a nearly empty bottle of orange juice in the refrigerator while he sits there, staring into middle distance. He's got the leash twisted between his hands, is wringing them in its tangles.

"The police thought you might have been involved with… that you might have been in trouble too," she says, setting the glass in front of him, and Marty realizes that he cannot. Deal. With this. But he has no choice, he guesses. He has no choice but to deal with a lot of things, right now.

"Marty," she says, a little sharper, and he flinches, twisting and twisting his hands.

" _Marty!_ " she snaps. "Your father is still out there driving around looking for you, we've been waiting all day for the police to call and say that they… don't just sit there staring at the wall!"

"I wasn't there." Marty's voice sounds mechanical even to his own ears. "When it happened. I just went over there. After."

She doesn't immediately respond; there's a clinking of more glasses and then she slides into the seat opposite him; the reek of ethanol hits him in the face. He wonders if maybe she dosed his orange juice a little, reaches forward to draw the glass closer, give it a smell.

"I'm sorry," she says. Yep, there's something in there. Not much, and maybe he actually needs something to dull and soften the ragged edges of his nerves right now, but still. A+ parenting, Mom. "I shouldn't have—you've been through enough today."

Marty nods, not trusting his voice any further. Takes a sip from the glass, cringing at the acrid bitterness of it. 

"It's just, you can't just disappear like that, you scared us out of our minds."

"I'm sorry," he mutters. The second sip goes down easier.

A long silence then, and then there's a hand on his, stilling it where it's still gripping and twisting the leash. He can't remember the last time his Mom actually…

"Did you find him?" she asks, even though the answer's obvious. "The dog?"

He shakes his head, then sighs, deep and harsh. "Einstein. No. I have no idea where he… god, Mom. I don't even know where I was _looking._ I have no idea where I was today."

From the living room, the sound of a screen door opening and closing, and a quiet burble of discouraged voices in conversation.

Before they can make it to the kitchen, she pats his hand a few times, takes a long drink from her own tumbler, and fixes him with a look that isn't unsympathetic, but still is making its demands. "Can you try to stay here," she asks, quiet, "where we all know you're safe, Marty? For a little while?"

He nods, taking another drink of the spiked juice, and then she raises her voice and calls to George and Dave and Linda, tells them to come into the kitchen, and the next hour should be absolutely intolerable but the juice helps, the numbness helps. The bareness of the kitchen and the blaring fluorescence of the lighting helps. A lot of things help, now that he's willing to lower his standards.

*

He doesn't say much all weekend, wandering outside at random with the leash in his hand and returning back an hour or ten hours later, seemingly depending on the alignment of the stars. Come Monday morning, his mother asks him gently if he thinks he can manage school. _No,_ he says. He can't. That's fine, that's good enough, and she calls the high school from the phone in the next room, explaining the situation in mercifully vague terms. He's lost someone, a family friend, and that's a _lie_ —his parents were always the first ones to call Doc crazy, to get on Marty's case for spending so much time there, but he doesn't have it in him to call her on it.

Jennifer's been over a lot, trying her best to be a comfort. _I'm so sorry_ , she'd said on Saturday, and no, of _course_ their plans for the weekend are cancelled, she could never think of trying to hold him to that when he—and she's so, so sorry. 

He wants to think he's not as much of a shattered mess as people are acting like he is. He has talked to the police no fewer than three times, and the last two times he thinks he managed to keep his composure admirably. He's admittedly not imposing very high standards on himself right now, but still: date, time, location, what he saw. No, Doc didn't have any enemies that he knew of. He'd always been kind of an outcast but he never thought anyone could—could— 

No, he doesn't think it was a robbery. No, he didn't touch anything except for the key, the doorknob, the wastebasket. And he took Einstein's leash. He left his skateboard there, he thinks, and his backpack.

They can't give them back to him just yet, they say. That's fine. He doesn't care.

"Do you have any leads?" he asks them each time, because as much as he doesn't _want_ to know, he really needs to. _Why_ is the hardest question, the one with the most answers and the least.

"I'm sorry," they say, over and over, "But no, not yet."

"Okay," he says.

"We'll be in touch if we figure anything out."

"Okay," he says, and he knows they won't be. Hell, he's amazed he's not a suspect yet, that they haven't dragged him into a dark little room with a lamp in it, sweated out his secrets. There are things he could tell them that he's never told anyone, but they have nothing to do with _this_.

So he lies awake at night, clutching at empty air—hoping that when he wakes up this time, it will all have been just an intense, horrific dream.

*

At some point he finds himself sunken into the living room couch, Linda to one side, Dave awkwardly across from him. Dave must have just gotten home from work, because he still smells like fry grease and bleach.

"I'm just saying," Dave is indeed saying, "You don't _know_ for sure that he's dead, right? I mean, they haven't found him. So maybe just, keep your hopes up?"

Marty levels a look at his brother; he can't feel the expression on his face. Dave works right _there_ , right next to Doc's garage, but it's obvious he's not so much as peeked in because if he had, if he'd seen the state of the place, he wouldn't be saying anything so fucking _stupid_. And Marty is so suddenly furious at everyone being so stupid, the cops with their 'probable' homicide and Dave with his goofy, hopeful grin and everyone expecting him to be stupid too, because it would be _easier_.

"This isn't a goddamned _movie_ , Dave," he hears himself saying, and his voice is so off it's like listening to a stranger. "People don't just, drop half their blood on the floor and then, then _pop out of a fucking cake_ in the last scene saying 'guess what, I was alive all along!' _Christ_."

They look shocked, in the wake of his explosion. Good; he's been in shock for _days_ , so maybe it's time they figure out what it feels like.

Dave opens his mouth and closes it again. Linda's on the verge of saying something, doesn't seem sure just what to make it.

Marty gets up, stalks out onto the front porch. Drops onto the bottom step to stew. After a minute or two, the door behind him opens and closes.

"You and I both know what an idiot Dave can be," Linda says from somewhere above him; then she settles down on the step alongside. "But he really does just want to help."

"I know," Marty says. "I know he does."

"We all do."

Marty rubs the heel of his hand over his eye, pushes the hair back out of his face. "No one understands how bad it was. If they did, they wouldn't think for a _second_..."

Linda leans in, nudging against his shoulder. "I think anyone looking at you could see how bad it was. And none of us know how to help. But hey, maybe don't burn all your bridges in this family all at once? You might need us someday."

"I don't know what I need."

"Well," she says, reaching to ruffle his hair; he doesn't even try to dodge it. "Maybe that's a place to start?"

*

Linda's right, he decides later, and for a while, he works on getting himself functional. He manages to eat, a few times. He starts actually calling animal shelters and vets instead of just aimlessly wandering the streets with an empty leash. The nightmares are still off the fucking charts, and _no_ , he doesn't want to talk about it. Sometime on Tuesday, he asks his mother—who lost both of her parents and one of her brothers far too young—if it ever hurts any less.

It hurts less _often_ , she says, and that's an important distinction.

Tuesday night, he lies in bed, watching the clock. Just before midnight he sits up, hauls his sneakers and a jacket on, slides up the runner on the window. He isn't sure why the urgency, except that he can't bear to watch the clock tick over to another new day while he still feels like _this_.

The night air hits his face like water, and then he's gone.

* *

_Wednesday, October 30, 1985_  
1:47 AM

So: Clayton Ravine, after about an hour's wandering and another hour's still contemplation. What a morbid place, honestly; way to remind everyone literally every time they drive past it that some poor teacher's bones are still rattling around down there.

Marty shifts where he's sitting on one of the rocky outcroppings, posture perhaps too lax for how precarious a perch it is. There's something about this place that's been drawing him, pulling him to its teetering edge. Sitting here in the dark with the wind carding through his hair and carrying the sound of his breath down into the gorge below, it seems almost _haunted_.

He tells himself he's not suicidal, and really, he isn't. There's something that his romantic side, the part of him that understands loyalty deep in the bones, finds appealing about the idea of following someone even into death—but in the end, it's not who he is, not how he was raised. And it's sure as hell not what Doc would want for him.

But the factual idea of it has still been occurring to him a lot over the last few days, the images chewing at him without any urgency but with a disturbing, visceral level of clarity. Maybe he's here at the ravine to exorcise it by facing the reality head-on; maybe he just needs to feel it out, poke and prod it out into the light so that he can see what it's really made of.

Either way, he figures, flicking a bit of stone over the edge—he's not going down there. Not the slow way _or_ the fast way. It's a promise to a ghost as much as it's a promise to himself.

Then the clouds shift, baring the moon, full or nearly so—and down in the ravine, _far_ down, something glints and dances in the light. 

It takes a few long, tenuous moments for what Marty's seeing to connect. He'd like to think the quasi-dissociative fugue he's been in for the last few days is dissipating but he's still a long way from firing on all cylinders, and for a while all his brain can commit to is _huh, a light. kind of pretty._

Then the gears start turning and a few thoughts occur in quick succession: there are no roads, houses, or electrical equipment down there. There's therefore no good reason for a light to be flashing at him from the depths of the ravine, much less in what looks like a repeating pattern: three fast, three slow, and something about that sequence makes the back of his brain itch. For some reason he thinks of the hiking trip he took back in freshman year, or more specifically, the safety lecture beforehand. Remembers them saying to use a mirror, or a flashlight, or both, to signal for help if they needed it, to broadcast their distress to the open sky. Help. Mayday. SO-

Shit. _Shit_. SOS, that's where he's seen that pattern before. Someone must be down there, in trouble, and— 

"Okay, McFly, get it together," he says, pushing up from where he's sitting among the rocks. He braces his hand on a nearby outcropping, leans a little to try to get a better look. "Someone needs your help."

The realization is like an electric shock straight to his brain; it is like lightning. Someone needs his help, and maybe this time he isn't already too late.

" _Hey!_ " Marty shouts down toward the light, cupping his hands around his mouth like a megaphone. " _Are you stuck down there?!_ "

No response he can hear, no visible indication. The light flashes onward.

" _Are you hurt?!_ " he tries, and still the light continues. It might not be an actual hand on a mirror driving the light, he realizes; it might be some sort of automatic beacon or a weird setting on a flashlight. Whoever's stuck down there might be unconscious, or unable to move, or…

No. There's no point in going there. He has to assume that the situation is still salvageable, that he's not actually so fucking useless as to have ignored someone in fatal distress for a damn _hour_ while he sat up here consumed by his own problems.

" _I'm coming down to help!_ ", he shouts, eying the edge of the ravine; there's a footpath around here somewhere he thinks, for adventurous hikers who've got some mountain goat in their blood. That he does not fit that description at all isn't important right now. " _Hold on!_ "

It takes him agonizing minutes to find the trailhead, which is really less a trailhead and more just a break in the thorny underbrush and thistle that crowd the edge of the ravine. Beyond that gap is a drop of about three feet onto an uneven ledge of rock, covered in scattered sand and pebbles that he can feel his sneakers skating over for an awful, stomach-turning moment. Then he catches himself and his footing stabilizes and he has a chance to look down at the path he's expecting himself to traverse, a twisting ribbon of paleness in the moonlight.

It's all steep, and all narrow, and all treacherously uneven; it is all _down_. This is a terrible, terrible idea.

Marty takes a steadying breath, closes his eyes for a second. Imagines being stuck down there, looking up, seeing only sheer cliffs and stars and knowing that no one will ever even find you. Will ever know what _happened_.

" _I'm on my way down!_ " he repeats, then before he can think better of it, begins the slow, careful creep down the path, clinging to the rock face and measuring his breaths and hoping with each shallow inhale that it won't be his last.

*

An age or two later, Marty looks up from where he is and down from where he is and god, he hasn't made much progress. He's had a little time to think, while his hands and feet have been occupied with the torturously slow descent, and he is regretting not having found a payphone and called this in _before_ attempting his own daring rescue. It's too late to rectify now, but it's still amazing what a little adrenaline does for the cognitive processes.

He stops for a second, gets a good handhold with fingers already scratched and skinned from scrabbling at the rockface. Leans out a bit, to try to get a bead on the source of the light.

Where—oh. There it is, tucked in against the same wall he's hugging now himself, still maybe fifty or a hundred feet down but not, he realizes with the improved perspective, all the way at the bottom.

"That's a relief," Marty mutters to himself, leaning a little further.

The pattern of flashes is different now, has deteriorated since he saw it from the top. The clean SOS has become… well, he never learned Morse beyond SOS, so he couldn't say. But it's an erratic mess. Which means that there likely _is_ a human hand behind it, not an automated system. And whoever it is, their strength and coordination are flagging.

Shit. He has to hurry, if he's not going to be too late—if he's going to be able to actually _help_ and not just bear witness. He whips around back to the path, using his hand on the rockface as a pivot point, meaning to cover this next bit of ground more quickly even if it means being a little less careful with his footholds. But he doesn't get the chance.

Because all at once, his center of gravity shifts from over his feet and out into empty space; Marty grabs frantically for the rocks again, trying to re-establish contact where his pivot had slipped away. But there isn't anything to grip.

 _Leaned out too far_ , the sensible part of his brain offers, even as his balance finally fails and he feels himself slip off of the edge, throwing his arms out in a cartwheeling attempt to arrest his descent. _Whoops._

Then he's tumbling head over feet, rolling when he can, fragile flesh absorbing the impact of one rock, shrub, fallen tree branch after another, sometimes sliding, sometimes skidding, trying to keep his feet under him but it's impossible because gravity and friction don't work that way. 

And he falls.

Eventually—after too long, after too many sickening inversions of ground-sky-ground-sky—he stops falling, rolling out onto a surface just horizontal enough to contain his momentum. He lands hard on his hip and shoulder; a sharp, sudden pain blooms from the right side of his head, enough to make his vision white out for a second or two, and it's all he can do to get his hands under him and try to lift his head, try to open his eyes— 

_—all around him, rocks and rocks and rocks—and over him stands a woman, leaning down with warm dark eyes and fine, dark curly hair and an old-fashioned dress in a violet so vibrant as to almost glow, looking at him with consternation and concern and perhaps a little pity, and—_

—and Marty can feel his head sagging forward into the dirt, can feel consciousness fleeing him like a dark-winged bird, secretive and easily spooked and carrying something precious in its beak. 

_Fly away home,_ he thinks—and then blackness.

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

* * *

_Wednesday, October 30?, 1985  
?:?? AM_

When he comes around, Marty does it hard—struggling, clawing his way up from the depths, pulling at consciousness like it's air. It's such an ordeal that the hazy, barely formed thought occurs, halfway to the surface, that this is it—that it really has all been a nightmare and he's finally forcing himself awake for real. 

But there's no pillow under his head, no limp ten-year-old mattress, no faint smell of cheap chocolate or the dimly lit outlines of his doorway, his nightstand. And he hurts _way_ too much. He isn't sure _why_ he hurts, but it feels like he's gone a few rounds with the front end of a mack truck and his head throbs nauseatingly. 

Marty pushes up to his hands, then further until he's propped halfway sitting, halfway leaning. Looks straight up, and sees just sheer rock walls and stars and the moon, half visible through light clouds. 

The ravine. He's in the ravine, because he was climbing down and he fell. He was climbing down because someone—

Narrowing his eyes, wincing at the stab of pain it causes, Marty casts around his immediate surroundings. He's alone, as far as he can tell, and he's not sure why he expected not to be. He can almost remember eyes, and hair, all haloed in violet, but trying to pin the memory down makes his head hurt.

Makes it hurt _worse_ , actually, because it's already pretty bad; Marty lifts one hand to where the pain is radiating from, somewhere above his ear, and okay, he expects the touch to hurt. But the feel of a cool, stiffening dampness in his hair is unexpected and startling.

"What the hell?" he says, pulling his hand back down, and in the bleached moonlight, it looks like it's come away covered in motor oil. He can feel a trickle sliding down his temple, another winding its way down his neck.

Oh. _Oh,_ that's a lot of blood. It's not as much as what he's seen lately but he just woke up and his head is still swimming, and it's all over his hand and caking into his hair and yes, of course scalp wounds bleed like crazy. Marty is unfortunately no stranger to head injuries. But he still feels his fingers go a little numb and tingly, sees a splintered grey haze start to close in on his vision, darkness licking at the edges. 

"Shit," he mumbles, pressing his clean hand over his eyes, squeezing a little across his temples. Trying to find grounding. "Not now, you still need to… to find whoever…"

Talking is making it worse, so he stops. _Thinking_ is making it worse, because all his thoughts keep circling back to the fact that he's hurt and alone and isn't sure if he can stand much less climb back out of here, and just what the hell had he thought he was _doing_ , coming down here like this?

So he stops thinking too, for a bit.

Eventually the dizziness fades back to a background tingle, and Marty opens his eyes again, takes another blinking look around. Okay, good, focus on the external.

It's a ledge. There are rocks, and tough scrub brush, though they're all strangely luminescent for how late it is, and he wonders if maybe something's wrong with his vision. It should be a worrying idea, but almost everything about the situation is worrying; it washes over him. Marty can see the path above by looking up, and he can see it far below when he leans to peer over the lip of the ledge, but the two meet somewhere that definitely isn't _here_. 

Okay. There's no way to get to it, short of throwing himself further down and hoping for the best. Even that concern feels watery, distant. He could maybe signal for help somehow, except that it would likely just draw someone else to fall in same as he did—a recursive loop of mistakes, and he can't help but laugh. "Yeah, no thanks."

So: one foot, two. Get upright. Oh, _ow_ , that really hurts, pain shooting from his hip down to his ankle with that sort of jolting shock that makes it hard to tell where exactly it's coming from. It's manageable, at least, so probably nothing _broken_ , but _damn_.

_Walk it off,_ he thinks, biting his lip hard. _Don't think about it, just walk._

He follows the line of the ledge, staying close to the wall and away from the edge, wincing and limping and gradually shaking the tightness out; he's surprisingly stiff for having been unconscious for only a short time, but maybe that's where wrecking against a stone outcropping gets a person. Then he doubles back, toward where he landed, and sees what he missed before: a scrubby, stunted tree growing out of a dirt-filled crack in the wall of rock, and underneath it, something man-made, reflective and bright in the moonlight.

"Huh." He stands still for a moment, caught in the grips of some insane notion that whatever it is, it's due _respect_. There's also a more practical thought trying to connect, and when the canyon breeze kicks up and tosses the branches in the tree, Marty watches the reflected light blink in and out of existence as the dense mats of needles block the moonlight's path.

Oh, hell. That's his signal—that's his person-in-need-of-help. 

" _Damn it_ ," Marty mutters, the reverence of the moment dissipating. He stalks over to the heap of refuse as well as he can with one leg not cooperating, crouches down to get a better look. It's a brassy metal tube, half in and half out of a shattered wooden case half gone to rot. A telescope, maybe? If so, it's busted up pretty badly—actually, yeah, that's what it is, because one of the lenses has been knocked loose, is lying in the dirt. That's what's been catching the light, reflecting and refracting it.

"What are you doing," Marty muses aloud, reaching to pluck the loose lens element off of the ground, "All the way down here, huh?"

Then his fingers catch on something else, something tiny and flat and hidden in the dust. He hesitates, then pinches whatever it is up into his palm, rubbing at the dirt caked onto it. It's metal, with a broken pin-back on one side, maybe silver judging by how tarnished it is. But even through the blackening, he can read what's engraved onto it by moonlight: _CLARA_.

Marty feels a chill run through him. This isn't just a bunch of junk tossed into the ravine as garbage anymore; they're someone's belongings, someone with a name if not a face— 

_No,_ memory insists, _There is a face, isn't there? You've seen it with your own eyes._

—and no one ever found any of these things, or even looked. No one's ever going to find him, either. 

One part of his mind fixates dangerously on that notion while the others work to put the pieces together, one badly fitting edge at a time. Dream, hallucination, real person? _Ghost?_ Hah, yeah, right. Marty pushes himself back to his feet, numbly slipping the pin into his pocket, and takes a few halting steps past the tree and the battered treasure trove it's protecting. The other side of the ledge is the only place he hasn't been, around these rocks here; it's the only place on this narrow shelf that another person could be hiding, and he doesn't know what his theory even _is_ at this point except that he really needs to find out if he's actually alone here— 

"Oh!" says the woman in violet, the figment of Marty's mad fantasy, when he finally rounds the outcropping. She's got the kind of smile that could easily become a laugh and she looks solid, looks real, and what the _hell_. "I was beginning to wonder if you would ever wake up."

"It's… you were… uhhh, I mean... " Marty says, breathy, eyes wide. He's acutely aware of how little sense he's making; points back the way he came. "You were. You were over there, when I fell."

"I was. You startled me away from my post, I'm ashamed to say. Your entrance _was_ on the dramatic side."

"I…" Marty trails off, the vowel long and wavery. 

Whoever she is, she seems inclined to wait patiently while he puts his thoughts back together. That's a good thing, because the longer he stands here looking at her the more questions he has—and also, the dizzier he feels, like being here in her presence is throwing a wrench into his brainwaves. She looks like something out of that third-grade school play about the founding of Hill Valley, except that her clothes are the real deal, not some bullshit sewn together by a bunch of PTA moms. She looks elegant and kind and she is not even a little bit in distress—she's not hurt, and she doesn't have so much as a scuff of dirt on her clothing.

Despite that, the first thing Marty's brain tosses to his mouth, like a blistering hot coal that neither can hold onto for very long, is: "Do you need help?"

"Do _I_ need…? Oh, no, Martin Seamus McFly," she says, looking him up and down with a weird blend of amusement and concern. It's a ridiculous question, really; he's the one banged up six ways from Sunday. "I don't need any help, but I do appreciate the offer."

"Okay…" At first, Marty's trying to process how she could be down here, _stuck here_ , and not need help. Then what she's said finally catches up to him. His mental train slams on the brakes with a sound like screaming metal. "...wait a minute. How the hell do you know my name?"

"Is that really what you want to ask?" The woman picks her way over the rocks toward him, effortless. "Pretend that you only get one question. You don't, of course, but pretending seems to help most people focus."

"Most people…?"

She raises her eyebrows in silent encouragement. _Find the right question_ , he almost hears in his head, and it doesn't sound like his voice.

"Okay… am I dreaming?"

She shakes her head.

"Hallucinating?"

"I don't think so," she says, "Though you did hit your head awfully hard. I suppose that depends on whether you're seeing anything _else_ strange."

"No," he says, rubbing one hand over his face. "No pink elephants," and she raises her eyebrows curiously and of _course_ , of course she doesn't get the reference, that would just be too out of sync with her old-timey aesthetic.

Okay. Not dreaming, not hallucinating. He's standing on a rocky ledge halfway down the ravine, in front of a woman who looks like she stepped out of a history book and who seems perfectly content to just _stay here_. Who is pristine despite the filth of the place, who is crossing over jagged rocks like her feet don't need to touch the ground. He's down inside Clayton Ravine, Clayton Ravine which was named after a teacher, a teacher who died here, and the woman's looking at him like all she wants in the world is to watch him figure it out on his own, to see him _shine_.

"Who are you? _What_ are you?" Marty asks, before his mouth can be stopped up by the part of him that knows better, the scientific part of him that Doc's been nurturing for three years now and _oh_ , there it is, a fresh wave of misery. But he bites the inside of his cheek hard, rides out both bright shocks of pain, because he needs an answer to this. "Are you, I don't know, a _ghost_ or something? Because I've gotta say, that would be kind of—"

"Not… precisely in the way you're thinking," she says, cutting off his nervous ramble, and now the smile does break into a laugh. It sounds like bells and the delicate tinkling of broken glass but it also sounds so _human_ that he could almost cry. "But I _am_ dead, and have been so for a very long time, which I think is what you're really asking."

"Great," Marty says, scrubbing his hands over his face. He just had to ask, and he had to be _right_ , give him a gold fucking star. "Perfect. Not _precisely_ a ghost, just you know, dead. And hanging out on a rock talking to random people who fall… in…"

He feels himself pale, pulls his hands away from his face to look up the ravine's wall again. Tries to figure out exactly how far he fell because oh man, oh _fuck_. It can't be—he can't have screwed up that badly. 

"You mentioned your 'post'," Marty says, carefully controlled, still looking straight up. "Earlier. What did you mean by that?"

When her hand lights on his cheek, turns his face back down to meet hers, it isn't cold. He'd been expecting it to be cold, but no, it's warm against his skin even where the blood's gone sticky and cool in the October air. 

"I keep watch over the gate," she says, gesturing to the rocks behind her; there's a depression that should be nothing more than a shallow cave, a good place to weather rainstorms for a stranded hiker, but the darkness beyond it is dense and physical, is utterly complete. 

"Gate," he says. "Okay."

"Well. It's not much of a gate, really, but 'hole in the rocks' doesn't have the same sort of romantic flair."

He looks at her sideways, eyes narrowed.

Another gentle laugh, hand dropping back to her side. "You'll have to forgive me, Martin. I've been here for quite a while now, and the monotony does wear on a person."

"No, no, it's okay," he says, shaking his head. Bored ghost. Weird, but okay, and not the most pressing issue. "I'm just trying to figure this out. Where exactly does this gate of yours go to?"

"There's honestly no way to say it that won't sound absurd."

"Try me."

"The realm of the dead?" she says, the delivery as awkward as the words. She scrunches her face up a little, clearly dissatisfied with how that came out, and tries again: "The underworld, if you like?"

And, well, she did warn him. Marty takes a breath, closes his eyes, because yes, that sounds crazy, like something out of a godawful corny movie—but he's talking to a ghost after chasing a mysterious light into the ravine, during a full moon and a few days before Halloween, and he might be… he might have… so whatever, fuck it. Go big or go home. "What, like Hell or something?"

But no, that isn't right, because she's too nice, smiles too genuinely at his obvious ignorance. "Do they still teach Greek mythology in your schools these days?"

"Uh, yeah, sure. Last year in English class."

"They were closer to the mark, though of course no one's ever gotten it exactly right."

Marty tries to laugh a little; it sounds more like a rattling sigh, and he knows that this is all nerves talking, knows he wouldn't be saying half this shit if he wasn't so _scared_. "Then shouldn't you be some kind of giant three-headed dog, something like that?"

A smile, sympathetic. "You've had dogs on the mind, lately."

"I… well, yeah, I mean. I lost one, I've been looking..."

"Unfortunately," she says, turning to walk toward the lip of the ledge; he follows, stumbling a bit on the rough terrain. It's really a very long way to the bottom, when he scrounges up the courage to peer over the edge. "The reality is a bit more mundane."

"But you still, what? Make sure no one gets in who doesn't belong?"

She nods.

Marty swallows hard, looks up from the drop below to the face in front of him, sympathetic and sad. "...do I belong?" he asks, quiet, and no—it's not exactly the _right_ question but it's goddamned close enough.

She tilts her head slightly, lifts her hand to smooth his hair over where the rocks did the most damage. "You might, very soon. But no. Your compassion hasn't killed you just yet."

Marty exhales hard, gaze swinging back out over the ravine. He's not honestly sure if he's relieved or not. "Why are you talking to me, then? If I'm not dead."

"You do ask a lot of questions."

"You said I didn't get just one."

Up above, the moon drifts behind a bank of clouds, its illumination dimming. "I know," the woman says, and for a moment, the faintness of the light makes her look a little more like a ghost should. Less substantial. "I didn't want you to be alone, I suppose."

The seconds stretch. There's not a lot to say to that; his head's still throbbing and bleeding and he's getting dizzier the longer he stands here and the top of the ravine is so far away it might as well be on another planet. _Can't get there from here._

"Martin..."

"It's just Marty," he says, quiet. "Only my… no, actually, not even my _mother_ calls me Martin."

A beat of silence; Marty drops into a crouch, trying to steady his equilibrium. "I mean, yeah," he forges on, and weirdly, he feels almost okay with this. "If you're gonna be keeping me company while I _starve to death_ down here, we might as well be on friendly terms. You're Clara, right?"

A mute nod that he barely catches out of the corner of his eye, then: "I don't claim to be a fortune-teller, Marty. You might get lucky."

But she wouldn't put good odds on it, that's obvious. And no wonder: not many people are crazy enough to go clambering down into a ravine on the off chance that someone might need help—crazy enough, or conscientious enough, or reckless enough with grief and longing.

Which brings them back around to the elephant in the room. Marty rubs at the back of his head, compulsive.

"So that's where everyone ends up, I guess," he says, but he's trying too hard to be casual, and he knows it. He has a fair suspicion that she knows it, too. Finally giving up on the bipedal thing for now, he drops back to just sit in the dirt; his jeans are a wreck already anyway. "Crazy."

"You're thinking of someone specific," she says from somewhere above him.

A sharp sigh, almost a laugh, bitter dark. "Yeah, of course I am. Why do you think I was hanging out at the ravine in the middle of the night?"

...aw, hell. Marty hadn't meant to just blurt that out; he'd been doing such a good job of keeping the whole thing tamped down up to this point, and now he can feel the rising tightness in his throat again, the sting behind his eyes. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, hard. It's not even that he's embarrassed or that he cares if she sees—he's just so _tired_ of feeling like this.

A hand touches his shoulder, and from the corner of his eye, he can see her settle next to him. "I'm sorry to hear that," she says, and when he turns to look, there's moonlight behind her, tracing out the curls in her hair and the lines of her face like a real person now, like the light is striking flesh. Her eyes are so dark, and so sad.

"I mean," he says, and he's going to end up rambling but he doesn't think he can get there any other way. "I'm not even a hundred percent sure he'd be there, I'm… _pretty damn sure_ , but not completely, and it's… driving me crazy, not knowing."

"That's what's upsetting you?"

"No." Christ, he's really fucking this up, because of course that's not the real issue. And it would have been a good lie, _just let me check so that I can know_ , but he's always been an awful liar. "No, it's not, I just. God, I just miss him so _much_."

Her hand drifts to rub lightly at his back as the first racking sobs run through him, and it's like a burst levee, like a runaway reaction. 

"I would give _anything_ ," Marty manages to get out between one fit and the next, because if he's not capable of subtlety right now then he'll just fucking _ask_. "To see him again."

He's breathing hard, wet and ugly, and he's suddenly very aware of the fact that his is the only breath he can hear. When he lifts his face toward hers, tentative, questioning, she just shakes her head. "I'm sorry, but you can't. You don't belong there."

"Yet. You said yet."

Her eyes go sharp, disapproving. "Were you planning on just giving up? Not even trying to be rescued, just giving yourself to the elements?"

A shrug, halfhearted. "Considering it."

"Is that what your friend would want?"

Marty flinches; he already knows the answer to that question. It's such an easy, cheap shot in some ways, but that doesn't make it any less valid. And that, as they say, is that.

"Believe it or not, Marty, I do understand," she says, leaning in toward him, voice pitched low. A confession. "You want more than anything to see him, and somehow, by sheer chance and against all odds, you've found the way to get to him. You're before the gate, you could just about reach through, and you're not being allowed to take those last few steps. It is… profoundly frustrating."

When he looks again, she isn't even looking at him; she's picking at the hem of her sleeve with one hand, is looking out into the darkness of distant rocks and empty space.

"Why are you here?" he asks, before his brain can arrest the thought.

"I've already answered that—"

"No, I mean… why _you_?"

"Because," she begins, then starts a little guiltily, looking back to him. "Because I died closer to this gate than any mortal that has ever lived. The... honor... is mine."

Marty regards her for a long, weighty moment, and god, it's nothing but misery all around, isn't it? No one comes out of this one okay. 

"It's not as bad as I'm likely making it sound," she says, forcing a smile. "I get to meet a lot of very interesting people. Not for very long, of course, and the names all blur together after a while, but…"

Names. A thought occurs to him then, something forgotten. "Here," he says, digging the old metal pin out of his pocket, offering it to her. "I found this over there, I thought maybe you'd want it back?"

She hesitates for a moment, mouth slightly open, before reaching to accept it—and something about the battered little piece of metal _changes_ when it moves between their hands. It seems shinier suddenly, less worn by time. "Yes," she says, turning the pin's front against the moonlight, a quiet awe in her voice. "Yes, I… thank you. I'd thought it was lost when I..."

She lapses into silence; Marty can't bring himself to break it. It seems like the closer they circle to the truth of these things, the harder words become.

"Clara Clayton," he finally says, his chest still a tight, hot knot of frustration but if there's anything positive that can come out of this mess, he can't not say it. "You know the ravine's named after you, right?"

"I didn't know that, actually," she says, a little wide-eyed. "No one has even mentioned it."

"Yeah," he says, pushing back to his feet. "Clayton Ravine, for the last hundred years. No one's ever going to forget you."

"I…"

"It's okay, I get it, you don't make the rules," he says, and it's not okay, might not ever be, but that's not her fault. "If you want to talk some more or something, I'll just be, I don't know. Over there, I guess, trying to figure out how to get out of this hole. "

Because if there’s one thing that he’s learned being stuck in this ravine, it’s that he doesn’t want to be here anymore. The temptation is there to just give up, give in, get to see Doc again that way, but the fact is, he didn't come here tonight to die. He came trying to prop up his will to live in the face of a future without his best friend in it, and the realization that _hey, the afterlife exists_ shouldn’t be enough to shake that resolve. Hell, he just spent an hour talking to a _ghost_ and he wasted most of it feeling sorry for himself—and okay, maybe he's been due a pity party, but enough is enough. It's time to focus on getting out of here.

So: he has a vague idea about using the scrub brush for a signal fire, though god knows how he'd actually ignite it—a vaguer idea still about using the lenses from the telescope to find a way to focus sunlight during the day, really concentrate it so it can be seen from up above, and he'd have to ask Clara for permission for that one— 

"...Marty?" Clara calls after him, summoning him back, a definite note of _I'm going to regret this_ in her voice.

He doesn't reply, just stops and turns to look back at her. She's still holding the pin, almost reverent—and he knows he's a pathetic mess right now, but he isn't entirely prepared for her expression to crumble in such abject pity.

"You're in the worst kind of despair," she says, reaching up to push an unruly sprig of hair from in front of her eyes. "And I've just denied you the one thing that could bring you solace. But your first impulse is still _kindness_. Just as your concern for a stranger brought you down here in the first place."

Marty shrugs one shoulder, grins a little like she's missing something obvious. "No reason for everyone to be miserable, right?"

She crosses the last few steps to him; this close, she's looming a little, but it refuses to register as threatening. She studies him intently for a moment, then smiles, the warmth of it reaching her dark, endless eyes for the first time since this bizarre encounter began. "You're a remarkable young man," she says, and then, a non-sequitur: "Turn around?"

Marty blinks. "What?"

"Just turn around for a moment."

Something about this doesn't seem quite right on the logical level, but hell, when does Marty ever give logic veto power over his gut? He nods, licks his lip against the dehydration he's already feeling after days of not caring for himself—and damn, it'll probably be thirst to do him in, not hunger—and turns away, facing resolutely out over the ravine. 

He can feel her touch the back of his neck, fussing with the collar of his jacket. "What are you doing?"

"Tell me about him," she says instead of answering, while she does...whatever it is she's doing. "Your friend that you lost."

"He was amazing," Marty blurts out, before the thought _I don't know if I can do this_ even has a chance to connect. The tear-choked tension is there, low in his throat, but the words come through it more easily than he expects. "Just… so brilliant, you don't even understand. He could have done anything, with _anyone_ , could have gotten the Nobel Prize probably five times over if he'd gone and worked with other scientists, but he just… kept me around instead. Because he, he _cared_ , he thought I was _worth it_ , he was the only one who ever..."

Marty trails off, suddenly aware that Clara has paused at her task. She laughs, bright and sweet, and all at once Marty can completely believe that she was a teacher once. The laugh says that he's missing the point but that it's okay; there's nothing derisive or mean-spirited in it at all. It's what no one who's ever tried to teach him anything has been able to manage, except for _Doc_.

" _Marty,_ " she says, voice still caught in the laugh. "That's all lovely, it is. But I just meant for you to tell me his name, what he looked like? I want to make sure I'm not sending you on a wild-goose chase." 

Marty feels his heart jump into his throat, beating a sudden, harsh double-time. She… wait, she changed her mind? Just like that?

"Emmett Brown," he says, quickly, before she can change it back. And even that hurts, even just Doc's _name_ ; Marty bites his lip. _Recite the facts, McFly, like you did for the police—this is ten times more important._ "Uhh. Tall, about six foot, sort of fluffy white hair, brown eyes? God, when I put it that way he sounds so _ordinary_ , but he's really _not_ —" 

"That still sounds familiar enough," she says, finishing up with his collar and urging him to turn back around. "I can't be completely certain—I see so many people—but I seem to remember someone like that. Now," she says, adopting a sterner tone. "Don't take that off, no matter what else you may do."

Marty reaches back, feels at the upturned collar of his jacket; there's something small and metal fastened to the inside of it, low enough to be out of sight. His eyes widen a little when he recognizes the shape of it under his fingers. "But... this is yours."

"Oh, it'll find its way back to me eventually. Right now, you need it." She takes him by the shoulders, turning him toward that darkened area in the rock and walking him steadily towards it; Marty's not even sure whether he's the one controlling his feet. That should be terrifying, but all he can feel is a weird anticipation—part anxiety, part hope, all desperation, the emotional texture of last chances.

"Find your friend," she says, when they're finally right before the gate. "Say what you need to. And then find a way back out. Don't linger; you know how that story ends."

He takes a deep breath, swallows. "Thank you."

"Thank _you_ , Marty McFly," Clara says, hands loosening on his shoulders. "This has been the most interesting night I've had in a very long time. Now, I'd say 'don't make me regret this', but I don't think that's possible to avoid. So I suppose just make it _worth_ the regret, all right?"

He nods, beyond words. This close, the pull of the darkness is terrifying, unbearable; it feels like it's pulling his heart out of his chest.

"Go on," she says, a smile in her voice—so he does.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wanted to quickly toss out thanks to Leaper182 for being essentially my partner in crime for this fic—for working with me on with the original idea, helping me hash out points of execution, and serving as an informal beta for these first two chapters so far (but especially this chapter)—and presumably for all the rest, so thanks in advance for those! You've been helpful beyond measure, especially with some of the pesky rewording issues I had in this chapter and with helping me stay on trajectory.
> 
> Also, if you like Clara the helpful ghost, then I have to recommend giving Irisbleufic's Lyra Burning (http://archiveofourown.org/works/3444437) series a spin; while this version of Clara has a very different nature and role than in LB, and the fic itself is quite different, there's something about the idea of some of her incarnations—the ones that didn't make it—sticking around to exert a presence in the other characters' lives that, honestly, resonates beyond particulars of plot. Iris also provides a mention of the Marty-as-Orpheus comparison that, while glancing, is still a part of what got me thinking in this direction. IT IS ALSO A GORGEOUS FIC THAT BROKE ME IN HALF, go read it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait. This is a long'un, and hopefully worth the wait. Thanks as always to Leaper182 for beta work and polish.

* * *

At first, it's all so much of nothing.

That is to say: it isn't dark, because darkness is a thing he could perceive with his eyes; it isn't empty the way a room or a box can be empty but more the way space is empty. He wants to find a reference point, because that's what human brains do: look for the neon dot on the map that says _you are here_. But there's no here, here.

There's not even much of a _him_ , here. He knows that his name is Marty like he knows that the capital of California is Sacramento and that the first string on a guitar is the E, but the context feels disconnected. He feels tired, damaged, riddled with grief; the back of his neck tingles like the hair there is standing up on end. He feels like he wants to lie down for a while.

 _Am I dreaming?_ he thinks, and then the next natural question, _Am I dead?_

But no, because he can remember Clara answering both questions in the negative, sad eyes sad smile, longing for the compassion of a stranger's helping hand. The sense-images surface, complete and untethered to any of his other recollections: the smell of road dust and horses and terror, the sound of a wheel splintering against rock, an arm offered in salvation that's somehow both there and not there, fading away like a ghost before he can get a grasp on it and— 

Marty shakes his head, or thinks he does, still floating in the nothing. That isn't his memory.

Dreamlike, there's a shift—not just the setting, but the whole scenario. He's standing in the middle of a field of winter wheat gone to fallow, stalks broken and trembling in the wind. He takes a step backward, then two, bumps into something; when he whips around there's a face glaring down at him from where it's painted crudely on a swath of canvas. He bites back a shout, backs away from where the scarecrow rustles, restless and angry, on its stake.

Helpless to keep his mind from wandering, Marty is reminded of something from another of his English classes; the poetry section, he thinks, and he remembers nothing of the title or the author but it'd talked about the afterlife in terms of rocks and scarecrows and broken ruins and _desolation_ , and there's something of that here—wherever _here_ is.

The scenario shifts. Now the ground under his feet is asphalt, wet-looking in the autumn humidity, reflecting the overhead lights in an oily black sheen between the white-painted lines of parking spaces. He can smell something acrid, like gunpowder or maybe just something _burning_ , but when he moves in a slow circle, there's nothing and no one here. It's an absence that feels palpable, like there's someone that should be here with him, something that should be _happening_ , but time has stolen it away.

Another shift, and it feels like there's something picking through his brain, rummaging through his memories with damp, loose-jointed fingers, teasing things out with a sickening delicacy; Marty recoils, retreating backward through scenes like they're just so many flat-painted backdrops— 

_—his mother telling the story of how she'd met their father, repeated so many times that they now know it by heart, the smell of ethanol and burnt toast and Linda's cheap perfume that she thinks makes her seem grown-up and the cigarettes he knows Dave has been sneaking on the sly. The ugly wallpaper, the wobbly wooden chair lurching under Marty as he shifts his weight to try to keep moving, and his old man has been promising to fix that chair for years but it never happens, so—_

_—the sting of half a dozen failed, childish attempts to land a girlfriend (and one time, the first and last time his parents ship him to camp for a summer, when he thinks for sure one of the other boys is as confused and lonely as he is and boy is_ that _a mistake) and he doesn't even know why it's something he wants, only that he's_ supposed _to want it. It takes him wising up and realizing that that isn't how it works before he finally ends up with Jennifer, and even then, Needles and the guys won't stop telling him that it's just a big gag, that she's been put up to it, or that she's dating him out of pity; poor Chicken McFly, still a virgin at sixteen, and the shiner he comes home with that day is impressive but—_

 _—his first guitar, his first lesson, and the teacher keeps nodding encouragingly and saying words like_ practice _and_ effort _and_ potential; _Marty knows that nothing worth doing is easy but it's so intimidating and he doesn't know if his fingers are ever going to cooperate, slipping clumsily on the strings, bleeding by the end of that first day where the callouses haven't come in yet. Maybe this isn't for him, even though the teacher seems encouraged; maybe he's not cut out for music even though music makes him feel connected and alive like nothing else ever has—_

 _—the stink of all the random kitchen chemicals he's mixed together in one of the little ceramic cereal bowls from over the sink, the ones with the oak leaves printed around the rim. He's a little worried about what might happen, but he's more curious than worried and when the mixture catches fire for no reason and blows apart, burning embers flying all over the carpet, there's a moment before he moves, before he reacts, where all he can do is wonder_ why _that happened—_

—Marty keeps moving, back and back until he eventually loses that thread, is bounced forward again instead. He stumbles, trips headlong into a string of other memories, shotgun-quick: 

_[Doc explaining to him six years later exactly what had caused that explosion, telling him about exothermic and endothermic reactions and heats of formation and a lot of other things that go over his head but just the sound of his voice is a balm against the memory of his parents' fury]_

_[Doc listening to his music, complimenting him on his progress, proposing an amp-building project with a hesitance that almost borders on insecurity, like he isn't sure that Marty will accept this awkward offering but every day they spend working on it, shoulder to shoulder and smeared in grease and humming with laughter, is worth a thousand of his teacher's bland assurances]_

_[Doc counseling him about Jennifer and about the bullies and about everything he's doing wrong on both fronts without it ever feeling like criticism, without it ever feeling like anything but_ help _even though by this point, Marty can almost admit to himself that he kind of wishes his friend would_ help _him by making him forget about the whole bullshit high school dating scene altogether]_

 _[Doc listening to him rant about his family with a look in his eye like someone who understands how trying blood relations can be but who still wishes he'd gotten over the frustration and anger sooner, wishes he'd had a chance to fix things while it was still possible]_

Marty clamps down hard, slamming shut the mental gates; that tickling spot on the back of his neck burns like a hot coal. Whatever this is that's in his head, it doesn't get _those_ memories, the ones spent in quiet companionship in Doc's cluttered garage with all the rest of his life locked safely outside the doors. He only has so many of those, and he's not going to be getting any more of them, and they are _his_.

Quiet in response, for a moment; the world narrows back down to nothing. He's floating in what feels almost like a rolling static field, like what the television looks like when the VCR's broken which is basically most of the fucking time, these days.

He gets an uneasy feeling, then, like being watched, or talked about, or _laughed at_. 

"Hello?" he tries, surprised to find he still has a voice. "Excuse me?" he says; just because he's in an unknowable void of meaning with something that can apparently pick through his memories like folders in a filing cabinet, that doesn't mean he's been terrified into remembering his manners. It's just… the best practice, in untested scenarios, that's all.

"Anyone?" he tries again, trying to keep the quaver out of his voice, and this time, the eerie feeling he's been having intensifies. It also clarifies itself: he's definitely _being laughed at_.

Marty feels a sharp spike of frustration, tries to prevent it from dissolving into anger. "Come on," he says, working to keep his tone even, "Give me something to work with here!" 

There's a ripple in his mind, a tugging sensation at the base of his skull, and a snap like the release of a taut rubber band. All at once, his memory feels whole, and then solid ground is under his feet again. Hell, he _has_ feet again, period. Marty looks down, watches in numb fascination as the surface he's standing on spreads from the point just under him, outward in every direction, the leading edges indistinct and shadowy.

Grey flagstone, it looks like, acres and acres of it, undulating in gentle rolling hills. As the wave travels along the ground, creating it or just revealing what's already there, structures come into view, pillars and bridges and what looks almost like scaffolding, staircases twisted in an impossible geometry, objects whose insides become their outsides halfway through the eye's seasick passage over them—all of it like something out of an Escher drawing. And spidered through all of it are miles of cabling, connecting everything up in a massive spiderweb of… what, exactly? Information, like a phone line? Power? What would the underworld need with an electricity distribution grid? But no, they're not thick enough for that. Maybe just guy-wires? Holding all this crazy, impossible shit in position?

"At least it isn't boring here," Marty says aloud, doing a slow, cautious circle, taking in the sheer scale of what he's seeing with a low whistle. Figuring out how the hell this place works could keep even the sharpest mind busy for quite a while. It's a comfort somehow.

He looks up; there isn't a sky so much as a pearlescent grey haze, colors emerging as gentle as thought and then dissolving again.

"Weird," he says, but there's a path under his feet, clearly marked out, so he starts walking.

* *

He walks for a long time.

It's hard to say how long because time doesn't feel right here; it's uneven, jagged, inconsistent. And it's not that the walk is boring—this place is packed with people, jostling around, doing the best they can to imitate the lives they no longer have. It's strange, because a lot of them seem to be interacting with scenery that isn't there, some sort of strange mass hallucination.

"Isn't the ocean lovely, today?" asks an elderly lady to what seems to be her husband; they're leaned together on a beach towel, gazing wistfully out over… more grey, eerie landscape filled with spires and cables and impossible geometry. No water in sight.

"So _green_ ," she says, and her husband coos agreement, and Marty shivers a little despite himself.

* *

A while later, he crosses paths with a pair of young women—and how sad is _that_ , and it's worse because their touchy, close body language screams _in love_ louder than any overt gesture could—walking the same path in the opposite direction. They're bundled up as if for cold weather, and when they pass, the taller of the two women accidentally bumps her elbow against Marty's arm—

—and for just a second, he can feel the cold wind of autumn cutting through his jacket like it had at the top of the ravine, can smell the richness of rotting leaves in the undergrowth, can see the flashes of orange and red... 

Then it's gone, just as suddenly, replaced by the same repetitive greyness. Marty spins on his heel to watch the two walk away, eyes narrowed.

"It's dumb," one of the girls says, leaning in harder, laughing at herself. "But I still love the woods in the autumn. Even though the autumn's not really… real, here."

No, autumn isn't real; the woods aren't real, the wind isn't real. Nothing here is real, and Marty feels a sudden panic welling up because if nothing's real how can he even _be_ here, how can his real actual body be anywhere but back on that ledge, slowly succumbing to concussion and blood loss and starvation? How can he— 

"Oh, I don't know," the other one laughs, "I bet it's autumn somewhere," and Marty forces himself to swallow the panic back down, struggles to get. A goddamned. Grip.

"It is actually October," he calls out to them after a moment, trying for casual, too much anxiety tearing up his voice to really pull it off. "Out there, I mean. For whatever that's worth."

They stop, turn to consider that, and Marty can feel them looking him up and down. "You just came from there?" the shorter one asks, dark hair bouncing in a riot of tight curls.

Marty shrugs, gestures vaguely at the mess he's made of himself. "Yeah, well…"

"Looks like you had a rough trip," she says, smiling. "But thanks. That's worth more than you probably realize."

"Hey," he says, just about shaking with the realization of how serious this all really is, how deep he's gotten himself in. "No problem."

* *

Maybe it's been a mile, maybe five or ten; Marty gets the impression that distance is no more reliable here than time is. His feet hurt, his knee and hip on the side he'd hit the ledge with, and he's seen hundreds of people, maybe thousands, but that's a drop in the ocean. How many people have lived and died on the earth since the beginning of time? There's maybe five billion people around right now, but there used to be a lot less and there's probably some math that Doc could do, something to do with limits and linear regressions—but for now, Marty's gonna have to settle on _a lot_.

 _For now_. Shit, this is real, he's really going to...

Marty stops walking for a minute, watches the mass of dislocated souls moving across the landscape, spanning off to the horizon. It occurs to him that he's likely to have less luck looking for one person in the midst of all of this than he had finding Einstein on the streets of Hill Valley.

Marty presses a hand to his mouth to suppress a stab of sick laughter, actively resists the urge to try whistling. Keeps walking, instead.

* *

A while later, and Marty comes across what looks like some kind of open-air festival. It's got a charming, old-fashioned feel to it, and he's wary of stepping off the path but there's something about the whole affair that tugs at him. It pokes and prods at memories of endless summer evenings spent at fly-by-night carnivals, shadows growing long and dim as the sun set through the skeletal frame of one rickety, hastily assembled coaster or another. It pulls, and it does so with an insistence that is, frankly, a little worrying.

 _I'm here to do something_ , he reminds himself firmly, _Not take in the sights like a damn tourist._

But what he's here to do is to _find_ someone, and there are a lot of someones here, and hell, maybe he'll get lucky. A quick look around, and then he'll get on his way.

So: wandering amongst a bunch of dead people chatting and dancing and playing carnival games and drinking lemonade, and he gets a few looks for his condition—none of these people bear any damage and he's willing to bet most of them didn't just die in their sleep, so there's got to be a way they're hiding it—but nothing any ruder than the usual curiosity stare. Maybe he's being rude himself, showing up at a social event looking like he fell into a ravine, but seeing as his day to this point has involved _falling into a ravine_ , they can cope.

Well, they're politely curious until Marty wanders up to where a knot of people have gathered along some sort of freestanding counter, manned by a heavyset, grumpy looking guy who's maybe in his fifties. Who proceeds to look Marty up and down and proclaim: "What'd you do, jump off a cliff or something?"

"What?" Marty asks, adjusting his jacket self-consciously; it'd been his favorite, once upon a time, but now it's pretty much trashed. His voice feels thin. " _No_ , I, why would I do that?"

The man rolls his eyes. "Fell, then. Kids today, you're all so caught up on semantics."

A tight swallow. "I'm just trying to find someone."

"Good luck with that."

"Excuse me?"

"You've got a long walk ahead of you, is all." The man produces a glass and a pitcher out of seemingly nowhere, sets the glass in front of Marty with a heavy thunk. "S'a big place. Why don't you take a load off, have a drink, cool down for a while."

Now that he mentions it, it _is_ awfully hot all of a sudden. Summer or not, it seems entirely too close, too humid, and he was dehydrated before he even started this trek. "Ahhh, sure, okay."

"Lemonade work for ya?"

Marty almost balks, almost asks for something unsweetened, thanks, because it's become ingrained habit by now; then he realizes that calories aren't likely a _thing_ here, seeing as no one's actually metabolizing. _May as well put up a neon sign, 'trespasser', over my head_ , he thinks. "Yeah, thanks."

"Just a stinking hot day today, ain't it?" the man asks, pouring the glass. "Lousy weather for a party, if you ask me. Just leaves everyone irritable."

 _It leaves you irritable, you mean_. Marty lets his gaze wander from where it had been—watching a gaggle of old ladies gleefully trying to throw the rings onto some bottles, and these games look to be just as rigged as they are in the real world—and onto the man in front of him. "Yeah," he says, surprised to feel himself smiling; it's been a while. "It is. Weird, I could have sworn it was cooler a few minutes ago."

"Yeah, well. Memory's as fickle as the weather, ain't it? Could be one changed, could be the other."

"I guess so?"

The guy pushes the glass across the counter, gestures toward a chaotic assembly of picnic tables to one side. "Go on, take a break. And you might wanna lose the jacket, you're only making things harder on yourself." 

"What, are you some kind of... coat valet, or something?"

The man squints at him like he's a little crazy; Marty realizes the guy never offered to _take_ his jacket, just advised getting rid of it. That doesn't make much sense, but...

"Or something," the man grumbles, irritated. "Specifically, I'm the drinks guy. Not sure how you could mix the two up, seein' as I just gave you a drink."

"Sorry," Marty says, kneejerk, and god, it is _so_ hot. He shrugs, rolling his shoulders to slough the jacket off—then freezes when a sickening tugging sensation pulls at the back of his neck, every inch he's putting between himself and the jacket's collar feeling like a _really bad idea_.

 _Don't take that off_ , Clara had said, and Marty's eyes fly wide—when had he let them drift into such a lazy squint?—as he shrugs the jacket back on in a rush. 

"I'm fine, actually," he says, eyeing the man. _Shit, did he try to do that on purpose? Was he just being friendly? Are they out to get me?_ Marty doesn't know, but he honestly feels sick to his stomach just from the momentary separation, and there's never been a bout of paranoia that was improved by nausea. 

"Suit yourself," the man says, shrugging, no skin off his nose, and moves down the counter to talk with someone else. 

Marty takes a slow, careful breath, making sure not to draw attention to it. He closes his eyes for a second, gathering up his composure.

 _What the hell am I even doing?_ he wonders, meandering over toward the picnic tables with the cold glass sweating furiously against his palm.

*

Marty's not sure what he's doing, or why. That should worry him. It does ignite a lazy flicker of concern, but he's still sitting here at a picnic table when he's supposed to be _finding his best friend_. Clara had said not to linger, but it's like he can't get his feet back under him, can't get gravity to let him go.

He twists the lemonade in place, watches it slide weirdly on the layer of condensation it's laid down between glass and wood. He still hasn't touched it, isn't sure why.

A harsh sigh, and Marty reaches back to rub at the base of his skull, massaging away the lingering numbness from his close call with the jacket. When he looks up, a similar motion catches the corner of his eye.

Next to him on the bench, wearing an old fedora and picking at a paper bowl of plain popcorn, is his father.

Or, no, because—because his father isn't _dead_. He's _not, oh please oh shit, how long has he been_ down _here?_ And his father also isn't this young, isn't a clean-cut twenty-something, but the resemblance is uncanny and none of the sensible logic stops Marty from squeaking out, " _Dad?_ "

The guy flicks a piece of popcorn halfway across the table, sighs. "You're mistaking me for someone else, pal. I've only got one kid and you're not—"

Then he looks up, actually looks, and if dead people could go pale, Marty bets the guy would have just then. " _Marty_ , kiddo, what are _you_ doing here? It's way too early."

Marty swallows past the knot in his throat. Okay, this close and looking directly at him, he's seeing some differences; his father's never had green eyes. And he said he only had one kid, so…

"You're… you're _Arthur_ McFly," Marty gets out finally. "You're Grandpa Artie."

His grandfather—because that is who this is, no matter how young he looks right now—just nods a few times, hesitant. "Yeah. Uh…" he trails off for a moment, seemingly at a loss as to how to proceed. "...how have things been?"

Marty shrugs, struggling to sound casual—his father's fine, he's not dead, and just how many panic spikes is this place going to put him through? God damn. "Eh, they could be better."

"Yes, I can see that," Arthur says, leaning to one side to get a better look at the damage—and this is _so surreal_. "Please tell me that didn't happen hanging off of a car on that skateboard of yours?"

"Ahh, no." Marty starts to reach up, stops himself; he's enough of a bloody mess already, no need to make it worse. "I thought I saw someone in trouble down in Clayton Ravine? And I was trying to get down there, to help them, but…"

As long as Marty had known his grandfather, he'd been a little distant, a little hard to connect with. Not _cold_ ; the McFlys aren't capable of that, but… hard to interest, hard to impress. When he'd passed back in early '82, it had felt weirdly abstract to Marty. It'd hurt, no question, but in a detached way, like a dream of pain.

Now, though, this younger version of his grandfather is looking at him with such naked pride and respect and sadness that he almost can't believe they're the same person. 

"Stupid, huh?" Marty says, nerves still jangling. 

"No, not at all." His grandfather sets one hand on his shoulder, lightly, barely a touch. It's awkward, offered like a necessary gesture, but it makes something in the corners of Marty's vision shimmer with color like a heat mirage. "You have to go out on a limb sometimes, when somebody needs you. I'm just sorry the universe felt the need to punish you for doing the right thing."

"I guess gravity doesn't stop existing just because you're doing a good deed, huh?"

"I'm glad you can be philosophical about it, at least," Arthur says, returning his hand to the bowl. He's stripping the puffy bits from the kernels, an obvious nervous tic. _Guess this is where I get my anxiety from_ , Marty thinks. 

"Still, though," Arthur says, "Your poor parents. George never did deal well with loss, always such a sensitive kid..." He shakes his head, dejected, and Marty feels a hot stab of guilt. He's never really thought of his father as _sensitive_ , never really saw many emotions from the guy aside from fear, shame, regret, and the occasional burst of affection, but he can imagine the way grief would twist and mold those features far, far too easily. The image in his head is shockingly close to what Marty had seen in his mirror, earlier this week.

And yeah, it's true that there's a nervous instinct riding low in the back of his brain, telling him not to let on to anyone that he's alive among the dead, and it's probably the safest, smartest thing. But man, watching the fallout _hurts_. His imagination wanders on from his father to what his grandfather's probably thinking about: his family propping each other up at a miserable autumn funeral, having to sort numbly through his things, never knowing for sure if it was really an accident...

"Yeah," he says, mouth bone dry.

*

"I'm almost afraid to ask, but how's Sylvia doing?"

The subject change throws Marty off for a second; he'd spent the last few silent minutes caught up thinking about the fact that at this point, his family wouldn't even have realized he was missing yet. It's heavy shit, but this? This is something he can be honest about, something positive he can do here. "Oh, uh, she's doing okay. I mean, of course she misses you like crazy, but she's still got a lot of things that make her happy?"

"She still sings?"

"Oh yeah," Marty says, happy to be able to smile for real. "There's this sort of open-mic thing they have at the park every Saturday morning. She never misses one."

Arthur smiles a little, sort of sad but sort of wistful. "You know, it was her singing that hooked me in the first place," he says, and yeah, Marty can understand that; his grandmother's affection and talent for music had been part of what had pushed him in the same direction, something he can admit these days. "It wasn't as easy as just falling in love, though. I guess it never is. We had a lot of… hurdles, things in the way. Probably a little hard for a kid your age to understand, with how much progress society's made."

Marty considers Arthur through narrowed eyes, twisting the glass on its suspension of water. Thinks about how his vision had bent when his grandfather had touched his shoulder, vibrant blue and green blooming in the periphery—a cartoon caricature of a single perfect summer day, repeating endlessly. How long has this festival has been going on, exactly, and how many bowls of popcorn has his grandfather gone through, stuck in his own past, waiting for someone to talk to? He thinks about obstacles and hurdles; about what things the march of time has made acceptable nowadays and what things are still taboo; about little secrets and big ones and about how none of it really matters anymore, because as obstacles go, death eclipses pretty much all of them.

"No, I… that's not hard at all, actually," he says, looking out over the strangely mechanical landscape, all of its interlocking details coming back into sharp focus. He's not sure when exactly they'd gone so foggy. 

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Arthur open and close his mouth a few times before finally settling on, "I'm sorry to hear that."

"Yeah, well." Marty slides the glass over until it's in front of Arthur, motion infused with a sudden urgency. He squares his hands on the table, pushes to his feet. "Word on the street is that life isn't fucking fair. Aah, sorry."

Arthur waves it off, picking up the lemonade to take a sip. "You know I never cared about language. That's a parent's job, not a grandparent's."

"And then I guess you die," Marty continues, shuffling his hands into his pockets. "And it all stops mattering anyway."

"No, it… it never stops mattering, Marty. Who we love, why we love them—it's always important. Even here. _Especially_ here."

"You think so?"

"I know so," Arthur says, and there's the thread of steel in his voice that Marty remembers, the confidence of a lifetime lived on his own terms finally slipping out from behind this young, nervous mask. "No matter how long we have to wait."

* *

_Or how long we have to search_ , Marty appends in his head, cresting another hill.

It feels like it's been hours since he made his excuses and left his grandfather behind at the festival; it feels like it's been _years_. The man had offered to go with him, to help him with whatever it was that he had to do, and Marty had felt a bit like a character out of a corny movie saying that he had to do this alone, but it'd seemed the right course to take. Now, hours or years later, he kind of wishes he had the company. 

He stops at the apex of the hill, looking down on the rolling landscape peeling away in all directions. If there are gates all over the world then this place must be as _vast_ as the whole world, must sit under the surface like a second skin, clinging to the planet's bones. Marty wonders for a second how they fare down here when earthquakes hit up above; he thinks about tectonic plates shifting over each other and colliding and wonders where this place would fall in a diagram of the earth's strata, above or below the fault lines? He can picture the diagram in his head, rough and scribbly in broken chalk—can hear the voice explaining it, and is hit with longing like a fist in his gut.

"Where _are you_ , Doc?" he asks, and then, since neither the muted colorscape of the sky nor the twisted grey plains have any answer for him, he swallows tightly against the urge to cry and starts his descent.

* *

" _Martin,_ honey, is that you?"

Marty whips around in time to see what looks like a _piece of detached ground_ settling alongside the path he's on, bearing three human figures walking along its surface—and then off of it, onto the path, without missing a beat—as if there's nothing at all strange about the situation.

The middle-aged woman leading the party seems to take his responsiveness to the name as confirmation, coming up to him with a bubbling effusiveness that carries a lot more affection than Marty himself can dredge up. They look… _sort of_ familiar, all of them, but he's having trouble making the exact connection he needs to. Plus, he's a little distracted, what with the whole 'moving piece of ground' thing.

"It _is_ you!" the woman says, and he finally looks away from the disturbance and takes a good look at the faces in front of him. Maybe he's seen them in an old photo album or something? "Look at you, all grown up. It's a pity to see you here so soon, but I always knew you'd turn out to be a real cutie-pie!"

"Aahhh," Marty manages; she's got one hand on his cheek, would probably pinch it if she thought she could get away with it, and Marty looks off to where the other two are hanging back, a silent appeal for help— 

—and behind them, the scenery has completely changed, not hazily like before but crisply, completely, with an immediacy that's shocking. He stumbles back from her hand, eyes wide, and it all vanishes again, replaced by the usual mechanical backdrop in a dizzying smash cut of reality.

Marty takes a steadying breath, tries to calm the rush of stomach-turning vertigo. Then the gruff-looking older guy steps in, setting a hand on the woman's arm. "Stella, come on, you're embarrassin' the poor kid. And how could you have known that, anyway? He wasn't even a year old when you got here."

"Oh _Sam_ , I could just tell, even back then! He's Lorraine's youngest, and she always was the most beautiful thing."

Lorraine's…? Sam and Stella… _wait a minute—_

Marty opens his mouth in shock, closes it. He probably looks like an idiot and sounds like one too, but between the nausea and the disorientation and the fact that he's finally understanding exactly who these people are—and, well, meeting one dead grandparent unexpectedly at the festival back there had been crazy coincidence enough, almost past the edge of believable; this is too much for random chance—he's not handling it very well.

"Anyway," the woman—Grandma Stella, he supposes, though he never called her that, wasn't talking yet back then—says, all mock offense. "Who exactly is here for him to be embarrassed in front of? Honestly."

"He seems plenty shell-shocked to me."

"Oh, that's just how everyone is when they get here. He's fine, aren't you, Martin?" 

"It's _Marty_ , Ma," says the third, unknown Baines, rolling his eyes like the teenager he still looks like, will always look like. "Right?" he asks, looking to Marty for confirmation.

"Oh, don't be _silly_ , Toby, I know who he was named for—"

"No, ah, actually," Marty says, gesturing vaguely at… Toby? His mom's brother, tall and brown-haired and permanently whip-thin, and Marty remembers his story; it's how his parents beat the seatbelt lesson into all of them. His mother's never been one to pull punches. "He's right, it's just Marty."

"Oh," Stella says, seemingly taken aback a bit. 

"See?" Toby says, stepping casually out from behind his parents, hands fisted into his pockets. Sam gives him a Look, but it doesn't stop the kid. "Martin's a square name, and no way you're a square, right?" he says, obviously only halfway meaning it. The tease is gentle but a little sneaky, and Marty has to remind himself that this is his _uncle_ , that he only _looks_ like a teenager, that he has been dead longer than Marty's been alive. 

Marty strains out a laugh, shakes his head at the ground, eyes closed. "No chance."

"Well, never mind that," Stella cuts in, moving in for the hug she knows she's owed; seeing as nearly everyone he knows is taller than him and only a few of them are polite about it, it's no surprise when she basically wraps her arms around his head and neck—what's conveniently within her reach—and _ow_ , the quiet throbbing in the side of his head blooms back into full-fledged pain as her arm brushes against it. He cringes away from the contact.

"...Marty?" she asks, hands still in the air, concerned.

"Looks like you smacked into whatever's goin' on with his head," Sam chides.

"Well, that shouldn't _still_ hurt, should it?" Stella turns to regard her husband, confused and put off, and over her shoulder, Toby's eyes narrow curiously, almost _knowingly_.

Shit.

"Oh, ah, no," Marty scrambles to cover for the slip, lifting one hand to gesture at himself. "No, I'm just kind of a mess? And I didn't want to get it all over you."

"Eh," Sam grunts, "We've seen worse."

 _You've_ been _worse, if what Mom's told us about that accident is true_. Marty shakes his head, trying to dislodge the mental image; his brain's been running morbid ever since he got here and it's starting to worry him. "It's just kind of—"

"If you're that worried about it," Stella says, and oh no, she's tugging up a corner of her sleeve, moistening the edge of it with that universal solvent, Grandma Spit. "I can try to get some of it off for you…"

"Ah, no," Marty says, backing away with his hands up, "That's… that's fine, I'm fine…"

"You _are_ fine, aren't you?" Toby cuts in, and if there'd been any uncertainty on Marty's part over whether his heart's still beating, the way it suddenly seizes up, flip-flopping over a missed beat, eradicates that doubt. "I mean, you're not actually…"

Toby trails off as Marty jerks his head to the side and back a few times in sharp negation, eyes wide with panic. _No, don't, please_.

"Not actually what, dear?" Stella asks, looking between them, and god—she's probably nowhere near as dim as her exaggerated grandmother schtick would lead Marty to believe. This is going to be _tricky_.

A beat of silence, considering, and then Toby shakes himself, eyeing his father in some silent exchange before turning to his mother. "Nothing, Ma. But I wanna talk to Marty for a minute, okay? Private-like?"

Stella seems about to protest, when Sam sets his hand on her arm again, turning her and guiding her away. "Come on, let's give the kids some space. You've been smothering enough for one day, haven't you?"

An indignant sputter that's at least halfway a laugh, and Marty is still too worried about this secret coming out to bother being amused. Sam tosses a look over his shoulder at Toby. "You know how to find us later, Tob. Don't be too long or you'll give your mother conniptions."

They take a few steps away, and then Marty gets to watch the path do the bizarre detaching thing again, getting ready to spirit them away to… where, exactly? Where do the dead... 'live'? Where do they spend their time, all this endless time?

Where do they go, rootless and adrift, when people stop thinking about them?

"Hey, uh," he calls out, before they can vanish, because this is important. "It was great finally meeting both of you!"

"Oh, don't fret, Marty," Stella gushes back, shouting to cover the distance. "We'll be seeing plenty of each other later!"

 _Yeah_ , Marty thinks, as they start to recede. _Much later_.

*

"How did you know?" Marty asks once his long-lost maternal grandparents are well out of sight, eyes still fixed in the direction they'd disappeared to. "Was it the head thing?"

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Toby shake his head. "Nah, man. That was just confirmation."

"So what was it? How'd I slip?"

A shrug, casual. "It's nothing major, and not something most people would catch. You're just not _angry_ enough."

That's… not really what Marty was expecting, and he turns his head to face Toby, incredulity all over his face. His voice feels breathy, winded. "Wait, what?"

"You're seventeen years old," Toby says. _Like I was,_ he doesn't say, but it's there. "It was either some stupid accident or someone _killed you_ , and that's most of your life just, gone. Either way it went down, you're nowhere _near_ as pissed off as you should be right now. Trust me, I know how it goes."

 _I guess you would, yeah._ Marty bites his lip, looks at the ground. He recalls Arthur at the festival saying _I'm glad you can be philosophical about it_ ; bemoaning the lot of Marty's parents, having to bury their youngest kid; saying that everything still matters. He imagines what it must be like to watch a toppled truck skidding in on a collision course, way too fast to do a damn thing about it, and he feels a swell of shame, sitting lower and messier than the guilt. Of _course_ it's been easy for Marty to keep his head above water; this isn't _real_ for him. For everyone else here, this is as real as it gets. 

"Sorry," Marty says, shaking his head. "I guess this is pretty insulting, going around play-acting like this."

Toby waves it off. "Nah, s'okay. Anyway, from what I can see, you're just letting people make their assumptions. You don't strike me as a good liar."

"Oh yeah, I'm awful. Mom says I get it from her, that she never did anything worth lying about so she never… what?" Marty asks, because Toby is suddenly choking laughter into his hand, seems unable or just unwilling to bite it back.

"That's what she told you?" he manages, between squeaks and gasps. "Really?"

"Aah, yeah?"

"Then you better pull up a chair, Marty McFly," he says, regaining some of his composure—and _wow,_ one just appears in his hand; he sets it down backwards and drops into it, arms draped over the seatback. "Because it just struck storytime o'clock."

*

"I won't ask how you got here," Toby finally says, when the stories run out—Marty now knows that most of what his mother's told him about her angelic past has been pretty much an outright lie, and he isn't sure if he's more traumatized or proud—"But I'm assuming you're here for a reason."

So Marty spills what he can: he's here looking for someone, someone he didn't get the chance to say goodbye to properly, didn't get the chance to say a _lot_ of things to. And Toby gives him the secret of this place: want and focus.

"You want a chair enough, and focus on it, and you get a damn chair," he says, shrugging; he'd had to materialize a second one for Marty. "Same with people. We found you because I guess family just _knows_ , but usually it's just wantin' to see someone enough."

"But I've been wanting to see him this whole time—"

"You've also been getting all distracted, I bet," Toby says, waggling a finger back and forth between them as if to say: _Exhibit A_. "Which no one's gonna blame you for, it's a crazy place, lot of stuff to deal with. I swear it's gotta be _intentional_ , how distracting it is."

Marty's about to protest that no, of course he hasn't gotten that thoroughly sidetracked—but thinking back over the last indeterminate chunk of time, he realizes the truth of what his uncle's saying. And he's so _tired,_ on top of it. Now that he's had a chance to sit down again, the first time since that picnic bench with his grandfather, he can feel the exhaustion chewing him up like dull fire in his bones. He feels like he's been walking for days.

"Wow," he says, a little honestly stunned. "I've wasted _so much time_."

"Good thing we've got so much of it down here, huh?" 

"I mean, she told me not to stay too long, and now it might be too late…"

Toby shrugs, stands up; his chair vanishes, and he gestures for Marty to join him. "Well, I don't know how that works exactly, but if we can get you on your way for real, you won't have to waste any more time wandering."

 _Okay,_ Marty thinks, finding his feet even as every muscle in his legs protest in unison. Something in the back of his head is shaking in sudden, terrifying anticipation. _I can do this._ "Should I close my eyes or something?"

"Can't hurt."

So Marty does—sinks into the darkness behind them like he hasn't been able to in a week. When it's dark is when the memories come, and they _hurt_ , so he's been avoiding it, sleeping badly, living worse. This time, though, instead of dodging and shrinking away, Marty lets them come; lets himself sink into the ghosts of lost afternoons, comfortable and comforting—into phantom embraces and the warmth of remembered words. Other autumns, other winters, other springs and summers and the way the turn of time's wheel never seemed to _touch_ them aside from the way it had of painting their laughter in different colors through the year.

He lets himself really think about Doc, about Emmett Brown the man, the whole and real person, his best friend, his _everything_ —and Marty feels a desire to _go to him_ that is so strong it kicks the breath out of his lungs.

The ground beneath his feet hums, a violent tearing that's muffled by layers and layers of earth and stone.

When he opens his eyes, the piece of road he was standing on is no longer part of the road, is no longer even in the vicinity of the road. He watches, fascinated, as the end of this land bridge swings out to line up with another piece that's just as much in motion, and another beyond that one, like clockwork. He blinks, and they're shorter than they were, constricting, lessening the trek ahead of him dramatically.

" _Thanks!_ " he shouts down to Toby, wherever he is, if he's even still in range—and then it's time to start walking again.

* *

It's something like a park or an open-air market, Marty figures, and there are too many people. Even now, even with an assurance that he's at least in the right vicinity—an assurance Marty considers shaky at best—there's still too many people: milling, talking, walking, being social or standing alone. Being alive, almost, but the sheer density is too nerve-wracking for Marty to really appreciate it.

There are just so _many_ of them. He's never going to be able to find _one person_ in the midst of all of this, it's impossi— 

"—does explain the absurd energy requirement. I just wish I'd thought of the alternatives before resorting to _plutonium_ —"

Marty freezes—freezes and then whips around, eyes wide, because even with the hum of blended and overlapping chatter all around him, he _knows that voice_.

_Doc._

He frantically scans the crowd, pulse pounding in his skull. Catches a glimpse, through a loud and rowdy group of people far too young to be here: gesticulating hands, a riot of flyaway white hair.

"Excuse me," he says under his breath, trying to work his way through the crowd, darting between one group and another. "Excuse m—I need to get—" He finally gives up on politeness, elbowing his frantic way past even though he feels awful doing it and he normally never would except—except— 

There. By the edge of the park, standing next to a chalkboard that's somehow miraculously been conjured, chalk in one hand, gesturing out into the distance with the other. There's another man beside him, and they're both facing away, out over the distant landscape. There's something about the second man's posture—hands in his pockets, a casual hunching slouch—that registers as painfully familiar, but he's got sort of curly pale blond hair under the rim of his hat and that's clearly not right, so Marty homes in on the white-haired man with the chalk.

One step, two. Six days of living in a fog of _never see him again_ , falling off a cliff and charming a ghost and what feels like an eternity of wandering around down here, all distilled down to these last few yards. Three steps, and peripheral vision is fading; he's dizzy like he was waking up on the ledge. 

Four, five, six, and he's there, is setting his hand on the man's shoulder and saying _Hey, Doc!_ like the last week hasn't happened— 

But the man turns toward him and the greeting dies on his tongue because it's not right, that's not Doc at all, and that makes no sense because he knows he heard Doc's voice but there's no mistaking the incredibly famous face that regards him now with bemused curiosity and all Marty can think, wide-eyed and feeling unbelievably stupid, is: _Well, guess I finally found Einstein_.

"Oh," he ends up saying, lifting his hand away, "I'm… I'm sorry, I thought you were someone else—I mean, I know who you _are_ , I just—"

"Oh, that's quite all right, young man—" 

They're interrupted by a sharp gasp from the side, surprised and _pained_. When Marty turns, the gasp turns into a breathy wail shaped vaguely like his name, _Marty!_ , and oh, oh god. Yeah, the hair's wrong, and the man gaping at him in undisguised shock looks maybe thirty years too young, but Marty would know that face _anywhere_.

"Marty, what are you _doing_ here? What happened?" The voice sounds incredulous, sick with worry, on the high and reedy edge of hysteria. Marty is barely processing it, because _Doc_ is in front of him, his murdered best friend is grasping him by the lapels of his jacket and talking to him, moving his hands to Marty's shoulders and oh, he missed that touch; he missed the voice, even if it is sharper than he remembers, even if it sounds upset. "You were supposed to be _safe_ , I made sure they didn't even know you _existed_ , how the hell did you get yourself caught up in this?"

A question. He's being asked a question, but he barely hears it, because Doc is looking at him with those warm dark eyes and furrowed brow, so full of sadness and pain and longing and impossible _life_. He's reaching one hand up to touch the side of Marty's head, fingers tracing bloodstains down his temple and along the curve of his cheekbone, and Doc thinks he's _dead_ and Marty knows that he has to tell him otherwise, save him that pain, but he just. Can't. He can't. He's so tired, so suddenly and thoroughly drained, and he did it: he survived the ravine and he crossed through death itself and walked for what felt like days and then covered those last few yards without falling over, somehow. He's just going to collapse now, arms flung around Doc's neck, briefly crushing himself against his friend's body before sliding bonelessly to rest in Doc's supporting arms.

"I've got you," Doc's saying quietly into his ear, as his arm around Marty's back tightens, pulling him in. He sounds _wrecked,_ voice shaky with grief and guilt. His fingers work delicately through Marty's bloodied hair, searching. "It's okay," he's saying, though it sounds like it's anything but, "I'm not… I'm not mad, Marty. I'm sorry if I sounded… whatever happened, it's all right."

 _I missed you_ , Marty wants to say, hanging there in Doc's arms, bloodied and tearstained face pressed into the shoulder of the scratchy brown suitcoat. _I can't live without you_ , he considers, because cliche or not, it has a shape something like truth. _I love you_.

In the end, he can't force anything past the tightness of threatening tears—all he can do is turn his head a little, press an impulsive kiss against the side of Doc's neck, nuzzling in. It's reckless maybe, not a sentiment that's ever passed between them before but god, Clara said to _say what he needs to_ and not everything can be said in words.

A short, sharp little gasp is Doc's only reaction to the strangeness of the gesture, and Marty barely even notices. The grip around him never falters, might even tighten fractionally, Doc's hand splaying open against his back.

"It's all right," Doc repeats into his ear, voice wavery and low, "It's okay," and he's lying and not lying and it doesn't matter, because as far as Marty's concerned, he could stay here forever.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Added 2/15:  
> So, I had my predictable insecure freakout over the lack of response to this chapter, and I'm over it. And in general, I believe in the stories I tell, even if others don't seem to. I've had time to think it through, and this isn't coming from a place of desperation or attention-grabbing-- most of us came here from ff.net and we all know the kind of circlejerk bullshittery that went on there in the name of getting more reviews, and I will NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER hold a fic hostage for feedback. Because I'm not 13? And I'm not a self-centered shit. I'm fully aware that I'm not entitled to your time, to a particular kind of feedback, or to any feedback at all. 
> 
> But real talk here for a minute, friends.
> 
> I struggle constantly with an intertwined combo of depression and anxiety, so pretty much whenever I don't hate myself, I'm convinced everyone else is taking care of it for me. The meds I got on when the depression got REALLY bad a few years ago help quite a bit, but they leave everything sort of fuzzy, which makes it very hard to write. When I DO write, it's happening out of sheer force of will. And I'm not the only author you probably read that has these issues. A lot of your favorite fics probably exist against all reasonable odds due to mental health concerns on the parts of the authors. Artists are no different.
> 
> So no, we, and I, are not entitled to anything. And I at least would never deliberately stop working on a story I'm invested in. But we're also flawed meat machines with meat brains that don't always behave, and for many of us, continuing to produce--writing, art, whatever--in the face of feeling like everything is pointless, is a lot easier when it feels like we aren't shouting into a void. 
> 
> So, you know, think about it I guess, and take from it what you will; I'm not gonna tell anyone what to do. It just felt like something that needed saying.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is a point near the end of this chapter when music will become very important. If you're the kind of person who likes to have a real soundtrack to those kinds of moments, I suggest you have this link ready to go when you get there; it's the closest I've found to what I imagine being played:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kHL0_H0QHE
> 
> As always, a tremendous thank you to leaper182 for beta work, for giving me chunks of writing to start from when I was stuck, for helping me rework scenes that just weren't working, for kicking my ass to finish this chapter and generally help me get it ready to go. <3

* * *

For a long stretch, it seems like maybe time is _so_ broken in this place that it has literally stopped—temporal flatline. There's a weird suspended feeling in the moment, something too eerily still about the body he's pressed against, but he's holding onto Doc and Doc is holding onto him and that's amazing, impossible, indescribable after the misery of the last week.

Caught up in it, Marty drifts for a while. 

Then he feels the hand at his back ranging around, searching for something like the one at his temple had been, and the reassurances Doc's been mumbling into his hair are becoming strangled and thin, incomprehensible. 

"Doc?" Marty breathes against Doc's shoulder, quiet.

Doc doesn't respond for a moment; he just gathers Marty more tightly to his chest, something a little broken in the nonverbal noise he makes, almost like a sob. Marty feels a brief, fleeting press of lips to the top of his head.

"I'm sorry, Marty," Doc finally manages to get out, speaking against his scalp; he sounds positively gutted. "This is all my—I had no way to know they'd take it this far, but it's my fault, and you had so much to—I'm just so, so sorry."

At first, Marty doesn't really process what he's hearing. He's distracted—his cheek is pressed against Doc's neck, his mouth still buried in the thin cotton of his jacket, and when he takes a deep breath, he should be able to smell soot and machine grease and random chemistry and shampoo and, under all of that, the faint familiar scent of the man himself, but there's just—nothing. Nothing at all.

And that's distressing all on its own, but then the words connect, and Marty exhales, long and ragged. "What are you _talking about,_ Doc?" he forces out, biting back a bubble of panic-stricken laughter.

The hand at his back ceases its wandering, not having found what it was looking for. It's shaking, buried between his shoulder blades. "I'm talking about the fact that those bastards—that you're—"

He cuts off. Marty's been working on gathering his voice again, but Doc's already pulling his hand from Marty's hairline and threading it between them, urgent. It settles open-palmed over Marty's chest, and pressed together like this, Marty can feel his own racing heartbeat shake through them both. 

Doc makes a disbelieving sound, his hand slipping back out from between them; if this were any kind of normal situation he'd probably make a big show of his surprise, _Great Scott!_ , grabbing Marty by the shoulders, all dramatic shock. Instead he just ducks his head a little and speaks into the curve of Marty's neck, voice low and infused with quiet awe, "...you're alive."

Now the laughter does come, sharp-edged. "No shit," Marty says, just as quiet.

"So this... this wasn't... I didn't get you killed?"

Marty lifts his head finally; his eyes feel puffy even though he doesn't register that he's been crying, but Doc's in no better shape when Marty meets his gaze. "No," he says, shaking his head a little. "Of course you didn't. Why would you ever—"

"Never," Doc says, closing his eyes, and the relief settling into him is palpable. His head dips forward, forehead resting against Marty's. "Never knowingly, never if I could do anything to avoid it. But I was afraid that they found you despite all my efforts, that they..." he trails off, and his hand shakes where it's hanging just over the bloody mess of Marty's hair before settling back there again, feather-light.

And as long as he can just stay here with his friend, touching and talking like nothing has changed, Marty can almost forget the truth—but the mention of _them_ sends Marty's brain straight back to the living world, to the realities of missing person reports and police questionings and Doc's garage, with its perforated walls and splatter-horror dried blood and shattered, silent clocks. He closes his eyes again, shudders.

"...Marty?" Doc says, tentative. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Marty says, shaking his head, trying to think instead about ghosts on cliffsides and second chances and Doc standing whole and clean in front of him. "Just... really, really tired."

"Marty..." Doc trails off, and the tone of it says, _Don't bullshit me._

"God, Doc," Marty says, because he said it to Toby himself: he's a terrible liar. There's no point trying, especially not with Doc. "What _isn't_ wrong? Who the hell is _them_ , what _happened to you?_ I, I, I just stopped by that morning to... I don't even remember, because I just walked in and…"

"It's okay," Doc says, hand stroking back Marty's hair.

"...and the police wouldn't tell me anything and no one understands what it's like to walk into your… into someone's house and find an _obvious murder scene_ on some, just, _ordinary Friday morning_ , and..." 

"It's okay," Doc says again, quieter, and Marty figures from the sound of it that maybe he's having a panic flip-out, but he can't be bothered to try to stop it. Because the next part of the story is how he'd somehow ended up hanging around the ravine at midnight when his brain wouldn't stop tossing up helpful images of how easy it would be to step in front of a train, and how it had _scared the shit out of him_ even if he hadn't really _wanted_ to, and he can't talk about that. He can't.

"...and you would not _believe_ what I had to do to get here, Doc."

"You shouldn't be here," Doc says, subdued, like he can barely stand saying it. "No matter how much I've missed you. I don't even know how it's possible that you _are_ here..."

"Would you believe that the lady at the gate felt bad for me and let me in?" It sounds bizarre, even to Marty's ears, and he can't help but laugh. "The teacher, Clara? She's really nice, I mean, for a ghost. Lonely, though. I think she needs someone to talk to who isn't just passing through."

Doc's hand on his back is rubbing slow, careful circles, an attempt at soothing. "I remember her, yes. We talked for a while… she seemed very pleasant, though not exactly the rule-breaking type. Not really what I was expecting, but then, I wasn't really expecting any of this; it's all counter to what we understand abou—"

The motion at his back stops abruptly. "You were in the ravine," Doc says, a distinct note of horror creeping into his voice by inches.

"Yeah, I—"

Marty suddenly finds himself grasped by the shoulders, held out at arm's length, and he has to scrabble at the sleeves of Doc's... labcoat?... to keep his balance. He narrows his eyes, confused. "Weren't you wearing a jacket a minu—"

"Never mind that now," Doc says, and under the fish-eyed goggles sitting up high on his forehead, he looks stricken. "It changes, I haven't been able to figure out how to control it. But Marty." The grip on his shoulders tightens, urgent. "You didn't make it all the way to the bottom, did you?"

"Uh," Marty says, searching his memory. "No, just to a ledge, maybe halfway down? It pretty much broke my fall the hard way."

Doc lets out a theatrical sigh in relief; the grip on Marty's shoulders loosens, becomes just the usual thing with them—contact for its own sake. "Thank goodness."

"Why?" Marty asks, predictable, "What's down there?" but Doc just waves it away, shaking his head, and Marty knows stonewalling when he sees it. It's happened rarely enough between them; usually nothing is off limits, but there are obviously exceptions. 

"The better question," Doc says, and his eyes are still wide and worried. "Is how exactly did you fall into a _ravine?_ "

"Ahh, well, um."

" _Marty_ ," Doc says, sharp. "You _didn't—_ "

"No!" Marty interrupts, guilt welling up at the veiled accusation. And really, he'd rather go back to hugging the stuffing out of his friend than have _this_ conversation. He'd rather do a lot of things, falling headfirst into the ravine again among them, than have this conversation. "No, of course not, jeez. You know I'd never…" 

Doc sighs, glancing to one side; following the line of his gaze, Marty can see that everyone else in the area is giving them a fairly wide berth. Doc's previous conversational partner seems to have wandered off to give them some privacy, and Marty feels a pang of guilt; Doc was getting to talk to Albert-fucking-Einstein and he'd gotten in the way of that.

"I also know what grief feels like," Doc says, quietly, to the air. Then he turns back to face Marty directly. "Especially at your age. How overwhelming it can be. I'm sorry though, I shouldn't have implied it. I do know better than that."

 _I'd hope so_ , Marty thinks, biting his lip, _except that it was almost true, a little._

"What happened, Marty?" Doc asks, gentler, the words almost a caress. 

"I asked _you_ that, a minute ago," Marty says, taking refuge in obstinacy; maybe it's just the head injury and the exhaustion making Doc's voice feel like touch, like it's the sound of him alone pulling heat up Marty's face, but either way, he feels lightheaded. His fingers curl into the white cotton of Doc's sleeves, seeking something solid. "You still haven't answered me."

Doc looks down and away, focus shifting to middle distance.

"C'mon, Doc," Marty says. He tightens his grip. "I fell off a cliff and, and walked across half the goddamned underworld to get here. I think I've earned an answer to this."

"You deserve it whether you've _earned_ it or not," Doc says, shaking his head. "It was never my intention to leave a mystery behind to torment you."

Then why is he still…? Oh. _Oh_. Marty shifts his grip, slides his hands down to grasp Doc by the elbows, supportive. "I guess it's hard to talk about."

A sharp laugh, no humor in it, and Doc's voice is a thin grumble. "And it's literally the only thing anyone here ever _wants_ to talk about. It seems to be the afterlife equivalent of 'What are you in for?'."

"Aw, it can't be that bad. I overheard what you were talking about before—which, by the way, Einstein, _holy shit_ —but it sounded like… something sciencey? Something to do with plutonium?" 

Doc visibly winces. "That was… also related, believe it or not. A component I needed for one of my experiments..."

Marty narrows his eyes, trying to work out how that could possibly be related—then opens them wide again as realization dawns. "You ripped some off, didn't you?" He asks, because yeah, it'd been all over the news for weeks, the anchors shaking their heads in quiet, ominous distress every time the missing plutonium had come up. "From someone dangerous."

And a simple nod is all the confirmation Marty needs. "From a group of terrorists I thought were too disorganized to be effective on their own. I figured I was being rather clever, killing two birds with one stone—obtain the materials I needed for my work while also preventing them from actually building the bomb they wanted, and hopefully save some lives. Funny how cleverness works out in the end."

Marty says nothing, just opens and shuts his mouth a few times, a feeling a bit like anger starting to flicker under his skin. All of this, all the trauma, a week of misery, all for—? 

"It was a mistake," Doc says, and the sheer magnitude of the understatement stokes that flicker into a blaze.

"You _think?_ " Marty says, all the anger flooding to the surface at once. He drops his gaze to his shoes, letting out a frustrated noise, because even as the words break free on their own, he knows he can't say them to Doc's face. "Jesus, Doc, I needed you! And I had to deal with losing you because you thought you'd just _steal from terrorists_ and it wouldn't be a _big deal?_ "

When Marty looks up, Doc looks absolutely poleaxed, like it hadn't even occurred to him that anyone could be this distraught over his absence. Or maybe it's just that after decades of being alone, being sure he always _would_ be alone, a bare few years of Marty hanging around—encouraging him, standing up for him, confiding in him, just generally being a steady and reliable presence woven inextricably into his life— _somehow_ hasn't yet taught him what it is to be that important to someone.

The thought is too depressing to focus on for long, and in the face of its desperate sadness the anger can't hold up. It dissolves, bleeding off into the air, and Marty steps back into the embrace—pulls Doc in by one shoulder, throwing his arms back around him. "I needed you," he repeats, and he hates how plaintive he sounds but he can't be anything but honest, not here.

Doc's hands return to his back, no longer searching—just holding Marty fast against him. "I _was_ worried about you, that night," he says after a long, careful moment, "but for the most part, I was just glad that you weren't there. That my stupidity hadn't killed both of us."

"If I'd been there…" Marty trails off, muffled by fabric, and the grip around his back tightens convulsively. But there's no sensible ending to that thought, so the silence stretches—thirty seconds, a minute—before Doc breaks it, a quiet non-sequitur. 

"Marty… what happened at the ravine?"

"I saw a light down there," Marty says, rote. He got his answer, now it's his turn. "It looked like it was flashing for help, so I went to go help." He coughs out a laugh, brittle. "And I guess I'm not a very good climber."

"Did you tell anyone first?" Doc asks, with the resigned tone of someone who already knows the answer to his question. "Call it in from a payphone, so someone would know where you'd gone?"

Marty shakes his head in the crook of Doc's neck. "What, are you kidding? I couldn't waste the time, I didn't want to be too late to help." _Again_.

Another silence, and Marty leans hard into the embrace. He's acutely aware, now, that the body he's clinging to has no heartbeat, no breath save when it's pointedly drawn to speak, is probably only warm as part of the illusion. That his own pulse is pounding through them both like thunder, is betraying his heartbreak and his terror at the fact that when this is all said and done, he will have to go on alone. That this is _all_ an illusion, when they come right down to it—a facsimile of closure, and isn't 'closure' a bullshit concept to begin with? 

"If you'd been there," Doc says, vaguely ominous, "you'd still be exactly where you are now."

Marty shivers a little, clings tight. One of Doc's hands threads through his hair, settles protectively at the base of his skull. "I could have…"

"You could have been a second fish in the barrel. No harder to shoot than the first."

"It was really that bad?"

Doc sighs, nods against him. "It was, Marty, and there was nothing you could have done. I would still be here and you would still be here, only for _good_ , in that version of events. As it stands, we have a chance at getting you out of here, which is much more to my liking."

Marty doesn't reply for a long, measured moment; he can feel that spot on the back of his neck burning again, can remember Clara telling him not to overstay his welcome. Wonders why he thought the chance to say a few quick things, his questions and his confessions and his goodbyes, would ever be enough.

When he finally steps back a little, looks up, he can't feel the expression on his face—but Doc must be able to read it plain as day, see the temptation that's biting at him, because his friend's face suddenly darkens.

"Marty…" he says, warning. "We _are_ getting you out of here."

"Sure, yeah," Marty says, "but hey, what's the rush?" and it's a stupid question and he knows it and oh god, his voice is doing that thing, going thin and strained like it was when he was talking to Clara. If he's not careful, he's going to start crying again. "I mean, this place isn't so bad. I could stay a while, you could show me around—"

Doc gives him a stern look. “Marty...” he says, and in that one word, Marty can hear all of the affection, the worry, the firmness that tells him he can't hide anymore—that Doc is _gone_ now, and Marty still has a life to live. 

Which—he knows. He does. But Marty still can’t stop himself from tearing up a little; he scrubs his torn-up sleeve over his eyes, tilts his head back against the onslaught of shit that needs to be said. Which he's just gonna blurt out now, like an idiot, because what else can he do? 

“Doc... when I leave here, I’m never going to _see_ you again. They're gonna sell your house and your stuff and I’m never going to get to come over and help you work on stuff and try not to set things on fire and, I’m never gonna walk Einstein again—” He stops, as the guilt over that whole mess hits him like it's fresh. “I couldn’t even find him after you… I just—he’s out there, somewhere, and I couldn’t even—” The words are just behind his teeth, wanting to escape, but he can’t say them out loud—that would mean that he’s giving up on finding Einstein, on making sure that he’s safe, and he can’t let Doc down like that. Not when he's already let Doc down in every way that matters.

Doc’s sternness cracks a little as he takes Marty’s shoulders. “Marty, you have never once failed me.”

Marty grits his teeth because hearing the words out loud, after they’ve been left unsaid for so long… is this one of the reasons why Clara let him come talk to Doc one last time? His eyes are stinging, and his throat feels _raw_. “I don’t want to leave…”

"Do you think I _want_ you to leave?” Doc lifts one of his hands from Marty's shoulder, cups the angle of Marty’s jaw, thumb brushing over the bloodied line of his cheekbone; Marty sucks in a sharp breath. “I'd say that you're my best friend, but that only invites the obvious observation that you're also my _only_ friend." Doc narrows his eyes, momentarily thrown off. "...neither of which really strengthens my argument, unfortunately."

Marty tries—really tries—to stop the sharp wheeze of laughter that comes out of him like it's been _punched_ out, but he can't; maybe it's what he needs most right now. "Yeah, uh, not really." 

Doc’s smile is faint, but pleased. “Besides, it won’t be forever. I’ll see you in a good…” He frowns again, and Marty can hear him doing the math in his head. “Sixty or seventy years?”

Marty nods, and the lump in his throat hurts. “I hope so, yeah.”

Doc gives him a stern look that Marty can tell he doesn’t mean. “You'd better have some stories to tell me."

Marty tries to run through the usual possibilities in his head—being in a band that makes it big, fame and fortune, maybe having a family, traveling the world. The dreams feel staler somehow, less rich and exciting, and he can already feel the gaping hole that will be right next to him, overshadowing everything he does, for the rest of his life. He’s not sure how he does it, but he forces a smile. “I will.”

Doc stares at him for a long moment—it feels like an eternity and with the way time works here, maybe it is—before he smiles back, the expression just as painful and bright as Marty's. He drags Marty close, arms tight and warm around him.

“ _Live_ , Marty,” Doc says, loud and emphatic. “Promise me.”

And Marty's about to reply—his mouth's open around it, the last promise he'll ever make to the dearest friend he's ever had—but the sudden, stifling hush all around them draws his attention away for a critical second and the words die on his tongue. Buried in Doc’s arms, he casts a sideways glance at their surroundings as best he can.

What had been a public thoroughfare so bustling as to provide the illusion of privacy has ground to an unsteady freezeframe. Everyone in their immediate area is looking at them: intent, fascinated. _Everyone_. A lot of their impromptu audience seem confused, but some of them—the ones dressed like something out of a history book, the ones that have obviously been here a good long while—are edging closer with a look of anticipation on their faces that makes them resemble nothing so much as a crowd in a movie theater, tossing back popcorn while they wait for the next jump scare, the next dramatic reveal.

"Uh, Doc..." Marty says, voice a little wavery with sudden worry. "Why's everyone staring at us?"

The embrace loosens, shakes out, as Doc turns to take in the scene. "I don't know, but I get the distinct impression that they know something we don't."

Marty would tend to agree, especially as he hears a stage whisper from somewhere behind him: _"What's going on?"_

 _"I guess that kid's_ alive? _"_

 _"Really, now. This ought to be good, I haven't seen this shit go down in a_ long _time."_

"Doc," Marty says again, an itch low in his spine screaming that something is really, really not right here, no matter that there's nothing obviously out of place. The murmurs spread through the crowd, strike a dissonant note, and Doc's grip on his shoulder tightens. "We should…"

"We need to leave," Doc finishes for him, obviously feeling the same thing. He scrambles to turn Marty, to get him moving in the other direction, toward the thinnest part of the crowd. Out of the corner of his eye, Marty can see Doc's face set in concentration, probably trying to do something impossible with the weave of this place but too distracted and inexperienced to actually pull it off.

For his part, Marty's doing his best to keep up, adrenaline working its magic against weariness and injury in a way he'd thought he'd exhausted his capacity for. "What's going _on_ here, Doc?"

"I don't know." They break through the crowd, heading for the pathway that had brought Marty here to begin with, though it looks different now, with one of Doc's hands still latched firmly around his upper arm—but whatever, it's a collective hallucination shared by touch. He gets it, and he wishes he could convince his brain to stop noticing it because he's got a feeling that being distraction-free might serve him well pretty soon here. "It's possible we were too free with certain information, but that's just a guess, a hypothesis at best. I've only been here a _week_ , I don't have enough of a grounding in—" 

There's a sound then: sheet metal tearing like tin foil, a thousand fingernails on a thousand blackboards. Marty claps his hands over his ears; Doc does the same, a kneejerk reaction that overrides the entirely sensible desire to keep physical contact between them.

Which is, Marty will realize in retrospect, precisely the point.

When he opens his eyes again, the ground is all wrong, writhing in disjointed stop-motion as a whole lot of _somethings_ detach themselves from the stone. They take on a three-dimensional presence as they rise, like balloons being inflated, and Marty's just getting a sense of their shape—humanlike, but small, coming up to maybe his hip and given how short he is, that isn't saying much—when he feels Doc's hands on him again. They land on his back, on his shoulder, and they're pushing, _hard_. "Marty, _run_."

"But what are—"

"I don't know, I don't _care_ —I'll draw them off of you, just get _out of here_." 

_Don't linger, don't linger_ , the admonition rings through his head, _you know how that story ends_ , and for a terrible moment Marty is afraid that he's taken too long, that the stay-or-go question's been taken out of his hands. He twists as he starts to run, giving in to an all too human need to look back, to see what exactly they're dealing with here.

It's… bad? It's not good anyway; the things are small but there are so many of them, and Doc's trying to keep himself between them and Marty but Marty can't see exactly how that's going to work when there's still more of them emerging from the stone by the moment.

And then he sees Doc’s hands, hands that he’s seen work precise mechanical magic with the most delicate of wires, grab one of the short _things_ and slam it bodily into a menacing cluster of three others. The first breaks apart in a shower of rock, and the the others go down hard, scrambling to right themselves.

Well, that's four down, but there are still plenty more, stone grinding against stone as they turn on Doc.

“ _Now,_ Marty!” Doc barks, his teeth bared, his hair wild, as he grabs at another one.

Marty stumbles backwards a step or two before he turns his back on the stone creatures, on Doc, and starts running.

The ground is still shivering with the effort of expelling more of the creatures all around him, making his panicked sprint into something riskier, but it's bad enough seeing how much trouble Doc's having with them; the thought of what those things could do to _him_ gives him the burst of adrenaline he needs to keep going. Somehow, he manages to dodge the most unstable bits of ground, twisting mid-step so that his feet land on solid chunks of ground and his ankles roll with the motions. It's a little like navigating his skateboard through the Maple intersection last year when they had the road all torn to pieces, and he's _got this_.

Then he hears a set of footsteps behind him, coming up fast—but when he glances over his shoulder, it’s Doc, lab coat flapping behind him, hands grabbing and shoving at the stone creatures as he runs. The guards—and that's what they look like, now that details are starting to come in, etching the impression of armor or a uniform into the stone like it's being carved in real-time—careen into each other and off of their interception courses, a clean defense, and all Marty has to do is stay clear of the wreckage.

Marty feels a wildly inappropriate pang of nostalgia as he runs; there's something comforting in the almost-normalcy of this, because while no, they've never been in _this_ much trouble, this well-oiled cooperation engine is something he's _very_ familiar with.

Then the engine judders, slips off its tracks—Doc's not as used to navigating such rough terrain, and he's just a little bit occupied with the one creature he's got a grip on and the other that's hanging off of his arm, trying to drag him down. That's not to mention the nearly _dozen_ others that are on their tail now; all around them, the numbers are growing. Whatever the cause, Doc loses his footing, skids out with one arm swinging wildly in an attempt to regain balance—and that's probably the only lapse these things are going to need.

The moment feels like slow-motion, Marty twisting his head to see: like one of those dreams where you know you have to do something or get somewhere but your body is moving like it's submerged in molasses.

They're going to be all over Doc any second now. Marty's supposed to be running, supposed to be escaping, and the stone creatures' numbers are growing so rapidly that if he breaks stride for even a second his escape route will be cut off, but they're _going to be all over Doc any second_ and Marty's putting on the brakes hard before he has a chance to second-guess himself. He swings around in a barely controlled turn to slap his hand into Doc's, grab hold and pull hard until he's back on his feet, sending his pint-sized passenger sprawling.

Then Marty turns, intending to just keep running like nothing's happened, but the path in front of him is choked with sentinels where a moment before he'd had a straight shot out of here. He turns a slow circle, clinging to Doc's hand and turning them both in a careful 360 while dread builds low in the pit of his stomach.

They're surrounded.

Marty draws as close in against Doc as he can, scanning the crowd of them desperately for any opening, for any crack in the wall they're forming. It's no good; when this had started, there'd been maybe six of them, but now they're in the dozens. Their size doesn't matter, in these kinds of numbers.

Doc's hand tightens around his own, possessive. Marty can feel the weight of something important on the tip of his tongue, something he's forgotten—but that's the problem with forgotten things, isn't it? He has no idea what it even _is_. 

For a long moment, the faceoff is a silent one, the sentinels stony-faced and expressionless, seemingly content to have penned them in. Then a change comes over all of them at once, faces split by wide, smug grins; a sound comes from them en masse, echoing from every direction and vibrating deep into Marty's skull, shaking up everything inside. It's a roar of white noise, then a rumble like distant violence—then it begins to resolve into words.

_foolish recently-dead-one_  
_does the illusion of the living world trick you so thoroughly  
_ _that you truly believe us bound by its physics_

_what good could it ever do to fight us_  
_to draw us away or lessen our numbers_  
_when a hundred a thousand a million of us can be summoned here before your trespassing boy can draw a single breath_

_and what good could it do to run  
_ _when the very ground you flee across is what gives us form_

Marty grits his teeth against the acoustic assault, head throbbing painfully behind his eyes and at the base of his skull. It's a pressure headache, like the kind people get on airplanes, and he feels like if they keep talking it's going to just, god, squeeze his brain right out of his ears.

" _Marty,_ " Doc whispers urgently, somewhere above him. He doesn't seem to be having the same problem which, well, great. More shit living minds aren't meant to comprehend. Marty's getting a little tired of this glance he's been given behind the curtain of this place. 

But either way, the words have stopped coming, and the creatures have moved on from taunting, because the knot of them is tightening. The pressure bleeds off, vision starting to cooperate again, just in time for Marty to see how impossibly close the smiling, smiling faces have gotten. He's jostled on one side, then the other, and all at once there are hands on him, everywhere, gripping him hard and implacably, pulling at him—pulling him away from Doc. 

"Doc!" he shouts, his arm wrenching out behind him where their hands are still joined. He flails with his free arm, trying in vain to push the creatures away. " _Doc!_ "

"Marty!"

"Don't let go!" Marty twists in their grip, hangs on for all he's worth, but the distance between them is growing by the second and they have him off his feet now and these things are a lot stronger than human muscle and tendon, and he knows already how this is going to end. "Don't, _please_ —"

"I'm trying, Marty!" Doc shouts back, and he _is_ ; he's trying and Marty's trying despite the fact that it feels like his arm is about to pop the socket because _nothing matters_ as much as the few square inches of contact they still have, this last connection that he cannot allow to slip away.

"Doc," Marty says, voice strained and weak—and then he feels one of the hands on him vanish and he has just enough time to think about what that means before there's a hard _thunk_ across the back of his head. It's funny, how it almost doesn't hurt, even as he feels his consciousness dissolving—even as he feels his own grip go slack, fingers limp as Doc tries desperately to hold onto them.

Even as he feels them slide free, the connection slipping away. Around him, the world goes dull grey again; or maybe that's just the slide into unconsciousness, slowed and hyper-detailed, dilated out like a dream.

" _Marty!_ " he can hear Doc wail, distant and muffled and panicked, and then: nothing.

* *

Somewhere: the sound of fabric shuffling, of stone on stone, of meaningless noises echoing through an empty space. Marty rolls to his hands and feet, groaning through the grogginess.

This time, waking up had been easier; it had happened all at once, like a light switch flipping up, the circuit of consciousness reconnecting in a shower of sparks. But he's still thinking through mud, and his joints feel like jelly, and how long _has_ it been since he's eaten or slept? Does that matter, down here?

The floor sways dizzily under him in a way that floors really shouldn't, and he concludes that yeah, it does kind of matter.

Okay. Feet, legs, get the center of gravity back where it should be. All body parts accounted for, and a quick sanity check of his own pulse shows that they haven't decided to execute him for trespassing. _Yet_. His head is spinning though, and he can taste Doc's name on the back of his tongue like it's the last thing he said before the darkness closed in, and he wants to give it voice again, but.

But he has no idea where he is, or who might overhear, or what his circumstances are—and instinct keeps his mouth shut, for now. Pressing his thumbs into the corners of his eyes, letting the rush of fractal light and pleasure-pain ground and center him, he finally takes a careful, sideways look at his surroundings.

 _Shit_ , he thinks, blinking away the lingering pressure-sparks. _I'm in a_ cage _?_

More a jail cell than a cage, really; the floor and walls and ceiling are all solid stone. From one side of the cell, distant lamps cast light in a jagged striation, crooked and rusted bars running the entire vertical length.

A shock of adrenaline, and Marty scrambles forward on his knees—the floor is uneven, his balance untrustworthy—to grasp at the bars like someone out of a cartoon or a western, _hey jailer, let me outta here_. The striped light falls over his face, too dim to be anything but a taunt, and beyond the bars: nothing. Darkness, peeling away.

Panic subsumes good sense. "Is anyone there?" he calls out; when no response is forthcoming, he gives the bars a frustrated tug. They have no give at all, which is disappointing but not surprising, and Marty rests his forehead in the gap between them for a moment, the shock of cold metal providing something like grounding.

Okay. He's not gonna be able to talk his way out of here, and he's not going to be breaking through the bars any time soon. There's some kind of mechanism on the outside of the bars, like a lock almost, but there's no hinges, no actual door for it to operate on, so it's probably just a red herring intended to waste his time and energy. 

There's no way out.

Momentarily stunned by the revelation, Marty lets himself slump backward off of his knees, backside hitting the cold stone floor.

 _I'm alone,_ he thinks, rubbing a hand across his eyes, and the anxiety spiral's already starting but honestly, it's pretty justified and he's more than willing to go along for the ride this time. _I'm alone and trapped and they're going to kill me so I_ belong _, or just leave me in this cell until I starve, and no one's ever gonna find me or know what happened, and all I wanted was to see Doc again and now I don't even know where_ he _is and I was so close—_

The panic cuts off at that thought, drains away to reveal something like clarity, and he runs that thought through his fingers again, tries to find its texture. _I was so close to being ready to say goodbye._

No, that's not quite it. The finality of it twists in his gut, turns his stomach. He tries again: _I was so close to being willing to wait._

Even that stings, because all the conversations they haven't had, the easy moments of camaraderie that Marty's never going to find a replacement for, the ridiculous inventions that will never be finished—these things might not be lost forever, might be waiting for him someday, but on a timescale Marty understands, they're _gone_. 

Marty reaches up one hand, touches the spot on his cheek where Doc had set his thumb earlier; the skin is still rough and tacky with dried blood. He feels a rush of heat under the touch, colliding with the memory of how _close_ they'd been in that moment, how easy it would have been to just lean up and in and—and for a crazy second there, he'd almost thought that maybe Doc was going to kiss _him_ , because it had been kind of now-or-never time and when it came to taking crazy risks, Doc had always been right there at the cliff's edge with him. 

But the moment had just hung, suspended in potentia, an exercise in wishful thinking. And the conversation had gone on, and that possibility had become just yet another thing that _could have been._

Marty drops his hand back to his lap; he feels ill, from his heels to his hairline. All he'd wanted, coming to this place, was to find Doc. All he'd _needed_ was… what? What does he need, really? 

_I don't know what I need_ , he hears himself telling his sister, what feels like a lifetime ago, and it is still true. Closure? Reassurance that all their possible futures are someday going to converge at this point? Absolution for all the years he's going to spend failing to really move on, remembering a word or a touch and being blindsided, decades down the road, by what he's lost and what they might have had?

It's too much—too much grief mixed in with the panic, too many missed chances, too much intractable sadness, and now: even if he gets out of this cage, even if he gets back to the world above, he can feel his future constricting down to a narrow tunnel, to a dark point in the distance. And how will he survive sixty years feeling like this?

"Doc," he says, almost a whimper. There's still no reply, and he can feel a weird pressure all around him, deadening sound like cotton wool in his ears, so maybe there's really nothing to hear. He leans against the back wall of the cell, heedless of the damage when he lets the back of his head thump against the stone.

 _Loss is a part of love_ , the thought runs through his head, though he's not totally sure it's his thought. The texture of it feels strange. _Maybe you need to accept that._

Yeah, sure, that's probably reasonable. Easier said than done, though.

_Maybe you need to grow up a little._

Marty scrubs the heel of his hand over his eyes. Maybe. Maybe that's right, but he didn't ask for this; he didn't ask for any of it. He didn't come down here with any petulant demands, and he didn't expect reality to bend around what he _wants_. All he did was lose his balance on that stupid path for a split-second. The rest has just been inevitability, a kind of freefall, a body and soul given over to one kind of gravity or another. 

_So what_ do _you need?_

"I don't _know!_ " Shoving his hands up into his hair, Marty pitches forward over himself in a sudden spasm of ugly, wrecked sobbing. "I don't know…"

 _Then stop thinking like a random victim of circumstance. Start thinking like_ yourself.

That thought brings Marty up short, because—because yeah, he hasn't really been doing much lately aside from bouncing from one circumstance to another. Even before he came here, ever since that terrible morning in the garage, he's just been floating, in varying degrees of numb.

He sniffs hard, trying to swallow past the lump in his throat. Shock, grief, inability to function in his life, the sob story he'd laid out for Clara, the bumbling path he took through the underworld, talking to his own ancestors about vaguely meaningful things—even his completely predictable temptation to stay. He could have been _anyone_ , walking the road he's been on, and Doc doesn't care so desperately about him for being just _anyone_. He saw something in Marty three years ago, something special and different and worth keeping around. And if he's going to get off this path, one that so many others have walked, Marty's going to need to find it.

Images cycle through his mind: Einstein jumping up to greet him that first time, all sloppy affection; a hundred bright, clear autumn skies; Doc as he was in the real world, none of the years and experience discarded like old clothes; Marty's bedroom, everything exactly as he remembers it but off somehow, the details washed out and idealized in the way of plywood movie sets. A key turning in a lock, smooth and easy. The smell of ozone that's been coming from the amp the last few times he's used it, a dull crackle of electrical overload, and he knows Doc had been working on getting to the bottom of that but it kind of doesn't matter now; it's as riddled with holes as the rest of the lab is— 

Oh. _Music._

Marty blinks, and the sobs hiccough into something that's almost a laugh, because isn't that another jailhouse cliche? Whip out the harmonica, _Nobody knows the trouble I seen_ —but all at once, his fingers are itching for the sting of taut metal and his heart for the release music has always brought him. And maybe it's inappropriate, maybe it's not the time or place, but damn it, he's already in trouble and he's played by this place's rules for too long. It's time to start playing by his own.

 _This is me,_ he thinks furiously at the intrusive voice in his head, whether it's really his own or not. He visualizes not the dimensions and materials and blueprint of the object as Doc might, but instead the feel of it in his hands—the lightness of its hollow body, the way the strings vibrate against his fingers, the way the curve of its shape sits tucked up against his leg, the smell of rosewood and linseed oil. The expansive stillness of whole afternoons spent playing for no one but Doc and Einstein and himself, practicing covers or working on original bits or just noodling, on a key or a concept or an emotional theme—and boy does he have an emotional landscape to play around in right now. _This is what I need._

And he _does_ want it—wants it with an intensity that surprises him, wants it like a balm, like a bandage for untreatable wounds, like a security blanket. He hasn't been able to put words to any of this, not really. Maybe it'll work better to let music do the talking. 

But no matter how hard he focuses that desire, nothing happens. He closes his eyes like he did under Toby's instruction and tries again; the tension is intense, an elastic tugging in the back of his head that's just this side of painful. Maybe he can't do this. Maybe getting the ground to move is easier than materializing things out of thin air, or maybe it's all so much harder because he isn't dead. Maybe…

No. Marty grits his teeth, persists. He needs this; if he can't have his friend and can't have his life the way he'd always expected it would be, he can at least have the means to express how he feels about all of that. 

It's almost more than he can deal with, the tension—then it releases, suddenly and unexpectedly. There's a feeling around the edges of his mind, like a nudge from somewhere outside, a mercy granted.

Marty opens his eyes, blinks away the grey spots in his vision. In his arms, across his knees, is a guitar. 

And it isn't the same guitar, isn't the horribly maltreated accoustic that he found buried in the mess of Doc's haven't-touched-in-at-least-ten-years pile early last year. It's in better condition, cleaner, the wood a little darker, but it's still an instrument and it seems to be roughly in tune when he gives it an experimental strum.

He takes a breath, closes his eyes against the tears he can still feel threatening. Starts playing, a fumbling progression in a brooding minor key that quickly gets its feet under it. The first few notes feel like letting out a breath he's been holding for a week, and now the tears do come again, silent and hot.

He thinks about how much he's dreading his future without his best friend in it, the way the thought of it feels inevitable and ominous like the distant thunder of a far off storm. He puts that in, a rattling rumble in the low registers that he can feel behind his ribs.

He thinks about how angry it makes him, that Doc took the risks he did, heedless of where his failure would leave Marty; thinks about how much white-hot rage he _should_ have for the cowards who decided to destroy one of the greatest hearts and minds humanity's ever had for the sake of their petty political agendas. It's not something he's had the energy to feel or express, but he puts it in, the tempo of the core progression picking up, notes taking on a sharp, brittle edge of wrath and panic. It's the anger Toby had been looking for, and Marty's finally found it, even if it's on Doc's behalf instead of his own.

And how many people has he met since he started this unintentional journey? His own grandparents, an uncle he'd never known, a lonely schoolteacher a hundred years dead, all of them with things to tell him that he'd never known, never dreamed. He puts each one of them into the melody he's weaving, gives each of their stories space to breathe, because grief is a more whole thing within its context, and all life and death and love is connected. Then he thinks about Doc telling him to _live_ , selflessness in the face of his own death, and how much Doc obviously loves him even if it's not quite like that, and how that's really all he needs—and a tremulous waver grabs ahold of the notes, bends and distorts them the way the tightness in his throat keeps wrecking his voice. 

Wringing notes from the strings is suddenly a labor, is overwhelming, and he lets the melody dissolve into that same approaching-storm rumble, lets the terror and the dread really sink into his bones like a charge of cold lightning. It chokes him, and the strings go flat and silent.

Marty lays his palm across them, a muting they don't need. Tries to really feel the pain becoming a part of him, something he's examined and processed and allowed inside for lack of anywhere else to send it.

When he looks up from his own hands—and quite a long moment has passed—there's something different about the quality of the light in his cell. It's even dimmer than it was, cooler, but kinder in some ways, casting everything in less of a sharp relief. Beyond his bars is a gathered, condensed darkness, blocking out most of the lamplight. It's the same height and general shape as a human but it's blurry, hazy. It has no limbs; it has no face. The shape reminds Marty of the entrance to the caves in the way it is completely, utterly black, timeless and terrifying not because of any primitive fear of the dark but because of the coldness of it. It is like looking into the vacuum of space. 

This should worry him, or at least surprise him. It doesn't. He feels a strange strength gathering, in his fingers and the pit of his stomach; this will be whatever it will be.

"That was lovely," comes a voice from the figure, a little melodic, a little off-key. Disconnectedly, Marty notices that the strange sound-baffling pressure on his ears is gone, has been gone for a while. "Why did you stop?"

Why did he…? Oh. The music. This thing had been… had been _listening_ to him, being entertained like Marty was some kind of street corner performer, playing for nickels. He wants to be mad, maybe even feels a tiny frisson of ire, but he's still fighting for control over his expression, his face wet with tears wherever it isn't wet with blood, and the anger crumbles in the face of that.

He looks up at the shape, wordless because he does not trust his voice right now. Maybe he doesn't _need_ his voice right now.

"Oh," the shape says. "I see."

Before he can react to that, before he can say _no you don't_ or _of course you do_ or _mind giving me a hint then?_ , the shadow does something that lifts Marty's heart straight into his throat.

Withdrawing, it turns to the side, facing off to the right and says, "You for whom he plays—" and oh god, he's talking to _Doc_ , Doc's right there and Marty didn't even _know_ , because of all that damn pressure clogging up his ears. "—you for whom he cries. Are you as moved as I?"

"Of course," Doc says, and he sounds plaintive, _devastated_. He sounds like he's been crying too, voice wavering with a constricted tremble that Marty's _never_ heard from him until today. "Always." 

"He has played for you before?"

"Yes, so many times."

"Why are you keeping him here?" Marty interrupts, finally finding his voice, defiant through his tears. "I know I don't belong here, but he didn't—"

"He resisted against your retrieval," the voice says, though it's still facing off to the side; the answer feels offhand. "Brought force to bear on those who keep order in this place."

Marty swallows tightly; he can feel the color drain out of his face. "No, look," he says, and he sounds a little hysterical and he can't even care. "He only did that because of me, don't—don't punish him for that, this has all been _my_ screw-up."

Silence, for a stretch. Marty has enough time to picture it: being kicked to the metaphorical curb, waiting out his sixty years, coming back here to find that Doc isn't waiting for him at all because… because what? What happens to the dead when they break the rules of their own realm?

" _Please,_ " Marty tries, voice thin. 

The shade finally turns its attention back on Marty, and then it's like it gathers itself into a denser shape, hugging lower to the ground. If it were a real person with _legs_ , Marty might almost think it was crouching down to his level. "You are very young," it says, with a hint of sadness. "And yet you risk your life in search of one whose life has been long, has run its course?"

"That's not what happened," Marty says, feeling the heat rise in his voice. "Nothing _ran its course_. This wasn't some god-damned nature documentary where you feel bad for the deer but hey, the lions have to eat too. This _didn't have to happen._ "

A silent, breath-holding moment, and then, because none of what he's just said really matters and he would have ended up here regardless: "He's my friend."

"Your… friend?" The voice twists itself strangely at the end, as if it's amused my Marty's word choice. "You should know that you can keep no secrets from the dead."

Marty swallows tightly, tamps down on the instinctive rush of panic at the implication, because _fine_ — if Doc knows, then he knows. It obviously hasn't been the wrecking ball of a revelation Marty had always feared it would be, and he's got bigger things to worry about right now. "Okay, yeah. You got me. But that doesn't change anything. He _is_ my friend, and I wasn't ready to lose him."

"Will you ever be ready?" the voice asks, and for a precious second, Marty has time to ask himself, _will I?_ before he's inundated with sense-images, reverse-memories forced into his head from the outside: phone calls in the middle of the night, medical documents slithering through his fingers, sterile hospital rooms filled with the roaring white-noise of fear, cold winter cemeteries. And it makes him want to throw up again, just like that morning in the garage, but if there's one thing he's picked up from all of Doc's recent ramblings about time, it's that the future isn't written; it's not even _drafted_. No one is prescient. Anything can be.

"I don't know," he says, because he doesn't. He doesn't know if he'll ever be able to deal with losing Doc, but there is a big, big difference between _letting someone go_ and showing up some Friday morning to find out they've been murdered overnight. "But the way this happened, it wasn't right."

"So you thought to come here, to bargain for his return?"

...what? Marty blinks in confusion, shifting to sit up a little straighter. There's a snideness in the thing's tone, something accusatory, and it suddenly occurs to him that he might not be having the conversation he thinks he's having, here. "What, no, I… I just needed to say some things. I never got the chance..."

No response, for a long while, and Marty can do little except watch as the edges of the shape waver and drift, the entity's entire outline overlapping on itself like liquid. There's a feeling here, of time suspended, and he wonders idly how many days will have passed when he finally returns home, _if_ he returns home.

"All of this effort and danger," it finally says, and if it's possible for a formless entity from beyond life and death to sound shocked, it does. "Just to say goodbye?"

"I… guess, yeah?" Marty says, not sure if he should be feeling embarrassed or proud of his own foolish loyalty.

The shape draws itself up again, looming. "And what would you risk," it asks, flat tone revealing nothing, "—what trials would you endure, to not have to say it?"

"Marty," Doc hisses from the side, and the theatricality of it would be comical if it weren't for how terrified he sounds. _"Don't."_

And Marty doesn't know what has Doc so panicked, can't really make sense of the question in this context. There's a fragment of a memory poking at him, something from that mythology section of English class that Clara had him thinking back to, but he's mixing up lyres and pomegranates and pillars of salt in his head and the connection just isn't happening. 

All he can do is parse the words themselves as best he can, and answer truthfully—hoping desperately that this isn't some kind of horrible monkey's-paw thing where he's about to find his mouth sewn shut—and say, "I... wasn't aware that was on the table, but if it is, then honestly? Anything, at this point."

A long silence then, punctuated by what sounds like a panicked scrabbling at nearby bars. The shape considers him, then shifts toward where Marty knows Doc is being held. There's a faint sound of distress that ratchets up Marty's heart rate instantly, and he finds himself gripping at the flaking metal of his own bars, breath caught in his throat, peering uselessly into the darkness beyond. _Doc._

But there's nothing he can do, and when the creature returns its attentions to him, Marty can feel a faint tugging in his head, like when he first arrived and whatever-it-was was picking greedily through his memories. All at once, the remembered stench of dried blood and gunpowder hits him like a spike to the throat. Marty gags, slams a hand over his mouth, watering eyes pinched tightly shut—but he's had nothing to eat in what feels like days and the feeling passes as the memory recedes, leaving him pale and shivery in its wake. 

Another careful stretch, considering. There's a thought in Marty's head now that definitely isn't his, and it has no words but it feels like something ancient, like the most primitive visceral conception of _not a good death_. He finally looks up from where the nausea had pitched him forward over the guitar, and it's like the shape is thinning, spreading out, becoming more expansive.

"Perhaps you will succeed," the voice finally says, and it sounds both touched and a little bemused, "Where others have failed."

"Succeed at what? I don't underst—" 

"Stand up, Martin Seamus McFly," it says, and Marty doesn't dare guess what it's talking about but he can feel something hot and light rising up through his chest and he thinks he could almost call it _hope_ ; he lets it pull him shakily to his feet. "And listen."

***


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am SO SORRY at how long this took but I promise you it is 110% better than it was even a few weeks ago, and I'm finally happy to give it to you all. Thank you for sticking by me. Only an epilogue left to go!
> 
> As always, thanks to [Leaper182](http://archiveofourown.org/users/leaper182/) for beta-reading, suggestions, endless patience while I flailed over this for months, and ultimately getting me back on track. :)

* * *

Marty stands up carefully on the outcropping of stone, mindful of his balance because hey, he already learned that lesson once, the hard way. He still imagines he cuts a pretty dramatic figure against what passes for the sky around here, but the only thing that really matters is the path below him, cutting a disjointed, zig-zagging line across the landscape.

Maybe a yard or two behind him, he hears the footfalls stop, go silent. It's nothing unexpected. Marty reaches up to scratch at his scalp where the blood's gone dry and itchy, twists one stiffened spike between the pads of his fingers and thumb to break up the crust. It's new, as nervous habits go, and hopefully temporary.

*

__

_["You're going to leave, now," the shape says, and it sounds different than it had before—milder, softer, a warmth in it that could flare up into an inferno if he missteps, like the other side of a particularly demented coin. Beyond the figure, Marty can see a jagged pathway lit up into the distance. "The path is marked. Can we trust you to walk it faithfully?"_

_"I'm guessing that's our… that's my only way out so, yeah."_

_The shape hesitates, and Marty can feel its skeptical amusement, like a pointedly raised eyebrow. "_ Our? _"_

_"My," Marty corrects, a swift backpedal; it hasn't been said aloud, but he still somehow knows exactly what presumptuousness will get him, here. "_ My _way out, sorry, I just… I've been thinking in terms of_ us _for a long time, you know? It's uh, it's a habit?"_

_A beat of silence._

_"Some instructions, for your journey," the entity continues on, seemingly willing to forgive or forget the lapse. "You're being tested, if you didn't realize that already. There are many ways to fail the test, and only one way to pass it."]_

*

The place looks different, now. It's neither the pleasant, rolling hills of the illusion, all carpeted in green under a smiling blue sky, nor the complicated rigging of wires and impossible geometry that had seemed to be sustaining that illusion. It's just grey, endlessly, a blasted landscape of stone and dirt and stormclouds. The light marking a jagged path in front of him is the only bright thing, the only source of color—blue-white, forked like lightning, supposedly leading home. He wonders, idly, what exactly Doc is seeing.

So he's got his rules, right—don't leave the path, don't touch anything or anyone—and a little good advice, to not antagonize the locals by running his mouth, saying stupid shit because he's upset or not thinking it through. And yeah, okay, that's a problem sometimes; every black eye or detention slip he's come home with has been testament to that, even if he wouldn't really say any of them were his _fault_. 

And then, of course, the last rule, the _big one_. The one he'd been expecting ever since the moment he worked out what story he's playing out here, whose legendary shadow he's toeing at the edges of.

*

__

_["Your friend is a scientist. Has he explained quantum uncertainty to you? Taught you about Schrodinger and his beast?"_

_"It was a cat," Marty says, latching onto the one thing he recognizes. A sure way to distract Doc from less-than-successful experiments had always been to get him to explain this theory or that one, and he's heard this particular rant a dozen times at least. "And there wasn't really a cat anyway, I don't think? He was trying to say how absurd the whole idea was, that something could be alive and dead at the same time, so the uh, the underlying theory had to be wrong?"_

_The shape pulls back on itself. "I suppose that's possible," it says, sounding a touch taken aback. "Dr. Schrodinger's been here for such a short time, I've had no opportunity to converse with him directly."_

__Decades at least _, Marty thinks, biting back panic at the sudden spike of perspective._ And to this place, that's nothing. __

_"I bring it up for the sake of metaphor," the entity continues, tone evening out. "Once you arrive here, you mortals exist as possibility. Uncertain. Possibly you will be young or old; possibly you will look this way or that. You are all of these things at once, as you have_ been _all of these things, but as long as you remain here, there is no possibility of a_ future _as you understand it. Tell me_ figuratively _, young McFly: how do you retrieve a living cat from the box?"_

_Marty sucks in a breath. "You don't_ look _in the box."_

_"Until…?"_

_"Uh," Marty says, searching desperately for a way to extend the metaphor. "Until the experiment's over?"_

_A dipping in the shape, almost like a nod. "Follow that methodology, and you may find yourself with similar results."]_

*

In all of Marty's seventeen years, he's never had an easy time asking for something he hadn't truly thought he deserved. Sure, kids whine and cry over a candy bar in the supermarket checkout lane sometimes, but when it'd come to the important stuff, it had always felt more natural to Marty to fight and earn his way toward whatever it was. Just _asking_ had felt too easy, had felt like _cheating,_ and it'd taken Doc years to train some of that stubborn Irish pridefulness out of him, get him to the point of being willing to ask for help when he needed it.

How many times, over those early years, had Doc opened his door to find Marty sulking in the snow or the rain or wilting under the midsummer sun, furious at the world? How many silent calculations had he run in those moments, ascertaining exactly how much of a push Marty would need to actually talk about what was wrong, how many newtons of metaphorical force would need to be applied to convince Marty that he deserved any help Doc could give him?

It must have been infuriating. He can acknowledge that now, with the benefit of distance: he had been a dumb kid sometimes.

He'd like to think he's better these days, but old habits make good refuges and so Marty doesn't know if he deserves this chance or not, really. Did he trick someone? Is he being used? Is he being laughed at, made an example of?

_You asked the same things when you first met him,_ he reminds himself, mental voice thin and airy. _Because he came along just when you needed him the most, and your family left that kind of blind, stunning luck behind when they left Ireland. No way it was gonna resurface for_ you.

Only maybe it did, and maybe that's what's going on here, too. Maybe where Doc is concerned, Marty has some kind of intangible good luck charm in his back pocket. Maybe Doc _is_ the charm. Or hell, maybe it's just that Doc brings out the best in him, makes him put in everything he's got. _If you put your mind to it—_

Marty has no idea, honestly. He's just putting one foot in front of the other, then again, and again. 

And again.

*

__

_["What happens to me, if I fail?" Marty asks, because he is under no delusions about how this story is supposed to go and he needs perspective, badly._

_The figure regards him in silence for a moment, then glides closer. "We haven't fully decided yet. Perhaps you will simply return home," it says, musing, "having gained nothing from your journey. Perhaps you will not remember it." The shape of the figure has been changing as it speaks, gathering itself into a protrusion that looks almost like an arm, a hand._

_"Or maybe..." it trails off, setting the pseudo-limb right up against Marty's sternum; it's all Marty can do to stay still, to not flinch away, and he's shaking out of his skin with the effort it's taking. It's not a touch that carries any physical sensation, but it's_ present _all the same, cool and terrifying._

_"Well," the shape continues, matter-of-fact. "The living tend to forget just how easily the heart can be stilled." It gives a slight tap against Marty's chest, and there's a sickening stutter deep inside somewhere—it passes in an instant, but it leaves his chest feeling fluttery and hollow in its wake, leaves him clutching breathlessly at the front of his shirt._

_"Gh," he chokes out, throat tight with instinct-terror._

_The phantom limb slides higher, settles on the side of his head, and he can almost feel it slipping_ in, _through skin and bone, nauseatingly invasive._

_"And with an injury this severe to work with," the entity says, nonchalant as hell and that would be really ticking Marty off if he wasn't so busy_ not dying _, "It would be very easy to bend some rules and simply keep you here."_

__Is that all? _Marty thinks, mental voice running wild while he works on getting his breath under control. Hell, he'd been considering staying anyway—_

_Wait, no. It might mean 'here' as in this specific place, this maze of stone walls and iron bars, of cages and cages. That would be an_ unideal _way to spend eternity._

_"What do you think now, of the deal you've made?" the creature asks, withdrawing._

_Marty breathes carefully for a moment, stabilizing._

_"...I said I'd risk anything," he says finally; he wonders if it was ever even a question. "I think that covers it."_

_A hum of quiet approval. "Then let's get you on your way, boy."]_

*

So—he can't look, and he can't touch. But he can sure as hell _want_ , and he knows how this place works. Even as he descends the rise, loose-limbed and buoyant with hope, there's still a hold that his longing and need can exert here. All it amounts to in the end is an image in his head: a hand in his, large and warm and calloused from decades of borderline unsafe experiments, and _accepting_. A hand that had swept aside his bullshit barriers like they were nothing, had made him not even worry about the vulnerability of it all. The _idea_ of that contact, because he's being allowed nothing else.

Still, he can feel a shivering tug in response, like a standing wave at resonance vibrating through the back of his skull, and that is more than enough.

* *

Up ahead, the path drops through a dip in the landscape, into a bank of gathered fog like what accumulates in really old graveyards, wooden markers decaying in the damp, lighting up with foxfire.

Marty swallows tightly, descends the slope. It's fine—the haze is cold and clingy, smells a little like something burning, but it's not so thick he can't see the path, and that's what matters.

Then, all at once, there's a spot of coalescence in the mist, a person walking toward him. With the silhouette all broken up, it takes Marty too long—until the figure is nearly in front of him—to realize that holy _shit_ , it's _Doc_.

Except that—wait. No, Doc's behind him, is following him, and this doesn't make any sense.

"I don't want this, Marty," says Doc-not-Doc in front of him, with no preamble. He's holding his hands out, a plea for understanding. "There are people here I haven't seen in a very long time, people I love." Unspoken: _People I love more than you._ "My life is over, Marty. This is where I belong."

Marty presses a hand against his eyes. Behind him, he can hear nothing. He thinks about how scarce Doc had been in the weeks before this happened and how he only ever hunkers down like that when he's working on something big; thinks about the plutonium and the scratch of chalk on a chalkboard, the fact that even here in the afterlife, Doc hadn't been willing to let the matter of his mistakes drop, had felt compelled to seek a second opinion and figure out where he'd gone wrong. 

The parking lot from Marty's hazy, hallucinatory descent into this place resurfaces now, the emptiness of the scene like an ache in his chest, and he doesn't know why. But it feels important, like something unfinished.

"No," Marty says, shaking his head, uncertainty prickling at him but he has to be right about this, he _has to be_. "There's more to do still, more shit to figure out. _He_ wasn't ready, and _you're_ not real." 

Then a thought occurs, and it all comes together. "If you were," Marty adds, more confidence in his tone now, "I wouldn't be allowed to look at you, would I? I would have already failed." 

A fond smile, then, almost like the imposter is proud of him for having figured it out. "You don't know that for certain," he says anyway, and Marty gets it; they all have roles to play, here. "You don't know how I feel about this, because you didn't _ask_. You just decided. And you also don't know—" 

The imposter cuts off, raising his hands a little shakily, looking down at his own chest. From nowhere, holes appear in the colorful fabric, the threads unwinding on their own, singeing at the edges. Blood wells up, of course it does, and when the figure lifts his head back to Marty, the look of startled, wide-eyed terror on his face is so authentic that it makes Marty wince in pain.

_He's not real_ , Marty repeats in his head, over and over. _He's not real, the real one's behind you, he's not real not real not real_.

That isn't enough to stop him from rushing forward when the imposter wavers and then collapses onto his side, sprawled across the path. Marty drops into a crouch, hands hovering above but not touching, because he _can't_ touch, but…

"You don't know," comes the weak, strained voice from below him, "what will happen... when you get back."

_You are all of these things at once, as you have_ been _all of these things,_ the death-entity had said, and that means this is as real a possibility as anything else. From below him, a choking sound, wet and ugly.

_Oh, god_ , Marty thinks, because he knows this isn't really _his_ Doc but this isn't something he wants to watch happen, now _or_ later, when they get back topside. What if Doc isn't healed, when he comes back? What if he just bleeds out again, and what if Marty can do nothing to stop it? Just what is he damning his friend to, here?

"You won't be able to do anything," the sprawled figure says, articulating impossibly well under the circumstances. "You'll be just as useless to help as you were the first time."

_Useless_. Marty bites his lip, closes his eyes against the guilt, because in the back of his mind, there's a knot of rage sitting like a clenched fist—and most of it isn't even _his_. He reaches out to it, wraps it around himself like armor, lets it still his mind. There is guilt he will always carry, simply because he wasn't there when Doc needed him, but there will be time to work through that later. Right now, he needs to make sure there _is_ a later.

"Now I _know_ you aren't real," he says, certainty flooding through him as he pushes back to his feet, steps over the apparition, continues on the path. Doesn't look back.

*

It would be a lie to say he isn't a little shaken, after that—after the anger simmers down and the adrenaline rush passes, after the reality of what he's seen sinks in.

That happened, or something very much like it; it's a scene that's been preying on his imagination for a week but that has its roots in an ugly reality. And just like he will never be able to forget it now that he's seen it, he will also never be able to wipe that reality away—even if he succeeds, even if they live.

*

After what feels like hours but is probably just minutes, Marty comes across someone blocking the path. It's a sort-of familiar someone, in the way that the Baineses had been sort-of familiar, the kind of awareness of a person that comes from only ever seeing them in split-second freeze frames taken out of the context of their actual lives. He's tall, broad, mustached, severe, but there's something in the browline, the set of his eyes—

"And just what do you think you're doing with my son?" the man demands in a thick, almost cartoonish accent, and that's right, Marty remembers now. He remembers seeing a single picture of this man in one of Doc's haphazard photograph collections. Doc had looked shocked for a moment, haunted almost, then had hastily dismissed it with a handwave. _It's not… it's not important, Marty, and we have more pressing concerns. You were saying something about some trouble you're having with your parents?_

"He's finally come back to us, after all these years," the man says, strangely impassioned for someone Marty could swear Doc had described as fairly cold and reserved. Behind him, a second figure emerges, barely visible against the backlighting from the path, a generic female silhouette. "And now you're going to break his mother's heart and take him away from us? What gives you the right?"

"Whoa, wait," Marty says, but then he stops, squints at the second figure. Of course, if the man is Doc's father than the woman would be his mother, but it's like she has no features at all, and the harder Marty looks the more indistinct she becomes, like a rapidly dissipating shape seen in the clouds. 

_You haven't ever seen a picture of her_ , he realizes with a start. _You don't know what she looks like, so neither do they._

For that matter, the man standing enraged before him looks precisely like he had in the picture Marty _had_ seen, right down to the cut of the suit. Marty has the presence of mind to be impressed by the level of detail in his own memory, because yeah, for a moment there, he'd almost been convinced.

"He doesn't even _want_ to go with you," the man insists. "Look at him! He looks like our boy again, not the old man you knew. If that isn't proof of who his heart's with, I don't know what is."

It would have been a hell of a temptation, Marty realizes, if he hadn't already figured out what was going on, here. He takes a deep breath, lets it out, shaky. "I don't know if you're really who you look like," he says, even though he's close to certain that they aren't—just more masks, stolen out of his head to be used against him. "If you are, I'm sorry, but I really think this is what he wants—"

"And how would you know?" the man asks, deflated a little, quieter. "We raised him. All you are is his _assistant_ ," he says, spitting the word like something filthy. "How could you possibly know him better than we do? And what about what _we_ want?"

Marty clenches his hands lightly, latches onto something he _knows_ , something that is _truth_ : "I'm more than… I do know him. But if we're gonna be selfish about this… you'll have all the time with him that you want, later. Right now, I need him more than you do."

Then Marty holds his breath, walks straight forward along the path until he passes right _through_ the apparitions. He comes out the other side, unscathed, and keeps walking.

*

It's been a few breathless moments climbing over some jagged rocks that had neatly bisected the path—if Marty's not going to let Doc's dead parents lure him off, he's sure as hell not going to go astray for some _rocks_ —when a voice comes out of nowhere, hanging in the space all around him while simultaneously humming somewhere between his ears. It doesn't behave like sound, really, but it's not like the ideas and words that were being projected onto him earlier; those, he could nudge around a little, like you can with thoughts. This is coming from somewhere else.

"You do realize," it says, getting right to the point, "...that this is the kind of thing usually done by a _hero_?"

Marty grits his teeth, ignores whatever-it-is. It sounds a little like his mother, two or three shots of vodka in, but she would never be so outright _mean_. It's a sloppy, disorganized insult, easy to ignore.

"I mean, this entire schtick," says another voice, and this one sounds sort of like his dad but also a little like fucking _Biff_ , too, and the wrongness of that makes his stomach twist. "It's basically a textbook Hero's Journey, and for those, we usually get _actual heroes_. Brave, competent, courageous lovers here to take back what's rightfully theirs."

"Instead we've got... _you_."

"A scrawny slacker." Oh man, is that _Strickland?_ Obviously not really, because the guy isn't dead—Marty could only hope—but it's a really good impersonation, and that's a little unnerving. "A loser from a family of losers, an entire line doomed to mediocrity."

Marty sighs, shakes his head; disembodied voices aside, this is like a normal day, one out of hundreds. He'd thought this was supposed to get harder as it went along, but after being forced to watch Doc killed again in front of him, this? This is child's play. "Right. A slacker, a loser. Is this really the best you've got, or are you gonna get _creative_ at some point here?"

"Not even capable of owning his own feelings," says another voice, upping the ante; there's a tremor in this voice that sounds like Marty's anxiety feels, that sounds familiar like his own voice, like his own heartbeat. "Too much of a coward to see his love for what it is."

Marty feels his heartrate pick up, sudden anger flooding his system. He presses his mouth into a tight line, keeps walking.

"Most people in your position would have been declaring it the moment they arrived," continues the first voice, a matching tremble creeping in; they're _all_ starting to sound like Marty, now. "Would have shouted love's name to the rafters and insisted we cede to love's demands. How real can it possibly be if you can't even say the _word_?"

"I _did_ say it," Marty says, sharp. That accelerated quickly, but _maybe_ he shouldn't have goaded them, right. He presses his hand across his eyes, pinching them shut; temptation is rippling through him. 

To distract himself, he searches for the honesty in what he's saying, finds it in the memory of a long night a few months ago, one that had left them both bleary and incoherent in the gathering dawn, falling asleep to the sound of a quiet record on the jukebox and half-mumbled truths. Good enough. "I've said it, before. I love him. And it's not a goddamned secret anymore anyway, okay? He _knows._ "

Silence for a long moment, ringing in his ears.

"I love you," he says, voice barely above a whisper, regret seeping from every word. "I'm _in_ love with you. I'm sorry I didn't tell you when we were both, I don't know, _awake_. Or, hey, alive. God," he says, laughing a little, quietly desperate. "I can't believe I did the whole cliche thing of waiting until it was too late."

"Of course you waited, hesitated, stalled." It's the voice that sounds the most like Marty, the one that's taken on all of his inflections, all his hand-wringing nervousness. Marty can hear the fear in the voice like a mirror reflection, familiar but spun around backwards, empty. "You knew exactly what he would have said."

"I'm sorry, Marty," another voice says, doing a half-assed impression of Doc but clearly not trying very hard. Convincing impersonation isn't the point, anymore; they're going for the throat. "But I simply don't see you that way, and I'm honestly not sure why you think it would be appropriate."

"He'd be polite, at least," sneers the first again. "He wouldn't outright say, 'I'm not interested in pathetic children whose IQ doesn't even stack up to my dog's', would he?"

Marty flinches, tries to even out his breathing. _You asked them to be creative_ , he berates himself. _This is your fault_.

"Speaking of," they continue on, unrelenting. "That _poor dog_. You actually thought he could love you, after you let _that_ happen to his beloved companion?"

"Einstein's..." He pauses—Doc's probably listening, and Marty can't be sure of this. "...I don't _think_ anything happened to him, he's just… missing. I can still find him."

"You've had a week already. You failed."

"You failed, because it's what you do."

"You're not telling me anything I haven't already told myself," Marty snaps, remembered feel of the worn leash burning around his fingers. And he shouldn't egg them on, he _shouldn't_ , but his mouth isn't listening. "Change the record."

"What exactly was your plan, after all of that?" the same voice asks, abrupt. "A tearful confession? Begging for him to give you a chance? I hate to tell you this, boy, but I don't get the impression that he does _pity_."

"I don't need pity."

"Why not? It's the only reason anyone would ever have to love you."

Marty's feet finally drag to a stop; he scrubs his hands through his hair.

"A burden to your family."

_[One more mouth to feed, one more back to put clothes on, the reason his father had to take this shitty job in the first place—and Marty can see how it's killing him every night at the kitchen table, his spirit dimming and dimming and dimming and if it_ wasn't for him _...]_

"A disappointment to your teachers."

_[Why can't he just try a little harder, why can't he ever live up to his potential, does he want to be flipping burgers like his idiot brother for the rest of his life? If he would only just_ try _, everything could be different...]_

"A loveless obligation to your girlfriend..."

_[When she looks at him these days, is there anything other than pity in her eyes? Can she see anything but the emotional trainwreck he's become, and does he even deserve that, with the way he's considering discarding her for someone new? Did she ever really mean anything to him?_ ]

_It's not like that_ , Marty wants to shout, defiant. But that would require strength, and his throat isn't cooperating.

"You think I don't know all of this already?" he asks instead, quiet.

The voice ignores him, continues on: "...and the one person who's ever managed to hold Emmett Brown back from the greatness he was destined for."

Marty hunches over a little, closes his eyes. He'll give them all the rest, but this… "You're lying."

"We don't lie, boy, because we don't _need to_. Don't you already know that he was meant for greater things? You told the gatekeeper as much with your own mouth. Instead he's stuck helping some snot-nosed kid get slightly better grades in school—a broken, sick boy that wants something from him he can never give."

"That's why you're ashamed. And for just cause." The voice is simply his own, now; they all are. That probably means something, but Marty doesn't have the clarity to unpack it. "He could never love you, because _no one_ could ever love you."

"If you could see what we see," and this voice is just a whisper, tickling in Marty's ear like a buzzing insect, sending its tendrils in to lodge in his brain. "If you could see the look on his face right now… oh, you need to see it, McFly. You need to turn and see it with your own eyes, see it for what it really is…"

" _Doc,_ " Marty just about whimpers, eyes screwed shut, searching for some way to refute what they're saying. Searching for the strength to start walking again, one foot in front of the other, but they remain stubbornly rooted, and so the space behind him stays silent. 

When he opens his eyes, the path ahead of him is starting to fuzz and fritz out, a staticky blurring that's making its edges indistinct and hard to trace with his eyes. He can feel the panic starting to build, threatening to overwhelm him, and he almost welcomes it because then he won't have to think about the truth, won't have to acknowledge what a pathetic freak he is, but.

But the path. The path he's been told not to step off of, the path that's deteriorating in front of him, and he can't just stand here and wallow. He _can't_. Doc's depending on him, and even if he doesn't see Marty in that way, even if all of this damned truth makes things awkward and weird between them for a while, even if it _ruins everything_ , he still needs to see this through. Because the world is not ready to be rid of Emmett Brown, not yet.

He takes a breath, deep and indulgent, in flagrant defiance of the dead souls all around them. When he feels around in the back of his mind, tries to find that phantom sensation of someone's hand wrapped into his, all he can feel is determination, and anger, and a nonverbal wave of desperate reassurance. No revulsion, no disappointment. No pity. It's as if the handhold has shifted, has pulled him into an embrace, two-armed and fiercely protective; he feels inexplicably held and safe and _loved_.

_Oh,_ he thinks—and in front of him, the path snaps back into cohesion. Marty lifts his head, forces a tight, brittle smile, and walks on.

*

For a long while, they leave him alone.

It's a good thing, really; the marker he's following is starting to flake out again despite how sure he is that he's on the right path, that this isn't a mistake. It's ratcheting up his anxiety to the point that he's been trying to run in short bursts, cover ground before it can fade completely, but it isn't working out very well. The further he goes along this journey, the more his leg hurts, the more his head throbs and his exhaustion and hunger are making their demands known.

He stops for a moment to catch his breath, hands braced on his knees. Under normal circumstances, he could run for miles without stopping, assuming he's got the right motivation. But circumstances have not been normal for a week at least, and it's hard to breathe right around a broken heart.

As he works on catching his breath, considering the ground in front of him, there's suddenly a touch to the back of his neck. Fingers maybe, light at first and then digging in hard, clamping around the muscles there and making him shoot forward just to get away from it, get out from under it. He's gotten a few feet forward before he even realizes what's happened, heart pounding in his ears, what little adrenaline he's got left trickling into his bloodstream. "Jesus," he says, reaching back reflexively to rub at the spot. "What the fuck was—" 

"Oh, come on," a voice pipes up, all self-amused condescension. "You know what that was."

Marty sighs, presses his eyes shut in frustration. "Yeah, it was you assholes."

"Mn," the voice hums, a seeming confirmation. "But next time, it might not be."

"Okay. Go on, get whatever this is over with."

"What makes you think it will ever be over? Tell us, McFly, with your modern _scientific_ perspective, where do you stand on the role of the brain? Is it just the seat of the soul, or is it the sum of the person?"

Marty rubs at his eyes, pressing until he sees sparks. His parents had tried to raise them all vaguely Catholic, in that disorganized, halfhearted way people do when there's a family tradition they don't fully believe in themselves. But it had never stuck, and he knows where this is going.

"How long," the voice continues, "can a brain sit dead and decaying, before the pathways are lost? Before it forgets how to be the person it was, before it forgets how to even be _human_?"

No. That doesn't make any sense—Doc's here, without any body at all, and he's still who he's always been. Which means that no matter how much it goes against everything Doc's taught him, there's got to be something to a person beyond just the physical. And anyway, he's pretty sure he wouldn't have been offered this deal if it wasn't possible for them to deliver on their promise, to make Doc whole again either by, well, repair or replacement. But something's nagging, and he isn't sure— 

_Perhaps you will succeed,_ the entity had said, _where others have failed_ , which had made it sound an awful lot like no one has ever pulled this off. Which means that maybe even that creature, that shadow of death, has no idea if this will work.

It's just a split-second of doubt, of over-thinking, but that's enough. Marty's vision frays.

For a moment, it's like he's seeing two things at once—the rocky underworld landscape, grey in every direction, overlaid with the view from the front steps of his house, sky ink-black, smeared in cold buttery-yellow stars. Then the latter seems to take over, leaving him standing on the porch with no idea how he got here, no idea what's going on, no idea why— 

Oh. He's moving. He's turning, dashing through the open front door into the house, and if this is a dream it's clearly not a lucid one because he's not making these decisions, doesn't seem capable of affecting what happens. Just along for the ride. His chest heaves with one panicked, exhausted breath after another; he feels cold sweat clinging under his clothes, the unmistakeable skin-feel of terror rippling through him as he slams the front door shut, leaning hard against it. 

He breathes, for a perilously long second or two. 

Then his hand's reaching down on autopilot to throw the deadbolt, and good thing, because just as he does there's an impact on the door from outside, like someone throwing themselves bodily against it, trying to break it down. 

"Shit," he hears himself mumble; the house is dark beyond the entryway. Maybe no one's home. That's probably for the best. " _Shit_."

After a moment, the assault on the door tapers off; Marty finds himself moving away from it, ducking into the kitchen, making his way by touch along the countertops until he's got a view of the window over the sink. Diffuse light from outside is falling on the stack of dirty dishes, picking out the chipped edge of a plate and the dulled serration of a few butter knives but doing very little to illuminate the room itself. 

He creeps closer. Everything is quiet.

Then a hand slams up onto the glass, rattling it in the frame with a noise that sounds, to Marty, like a gunshot. 

He's frozen to the spot as a face comes into view, bloodied and torn, the too-familiar dark eyes transformed by the wildness in them, and Marty can't _move_ or maybe he doesn't want to because this is his _friend_ even if there's something wrong with him, why is he running from— 

Then: the sound of breaking glass. A hand latching onto Marty's arm, clawing into him and yanking him hard toward the window, shards of the pane ripping into his skin. Marty presses his eyes closed, feels a broken whimper bubble up his throat, tries to pull away but he can't, it's useless, there's no running away from this and any minute, any minute— 

He feels something dissolve then, almost like he's passing out. The pain fades; the panic remains, but when he opens his eyes, all Marty can see is grey. Grey rocks, grey sky, the flickering light of the path meandering jaggedly across the landscape.

"Shit," he says, echoing his dream-self, leaning hard on his knees. He feels like he might throw up, if he isn't careful. It wasn't even real, wasn't even really _him_ , but he'd gotten caught up in it anyway and fuck, he needs a minute here.

The voices are silent, waiting.

"Yeah, okay," Marty says finally, trying not to sound as shaken as he is. " _Scary_. Except that they were running Night of the Living Dead on TV a few weeks ago. You know, Halloween coming up?" Weird, thinking about that—just another night crashing on Doc's couch, watching old movies from inside the warm curve of Doc's arm, no idea of what the next few weeks would bring. He grabs onto that memory, uses it to block out what he's just seen. "So, I mean, you can pull movie plots out of my head, what exactly is that supposed to prove?"

"Just something to think about. You know how badly impossible wishes tend to go."

"I know how they go in _fiction_. Believe it or not, it's not something that happens much in real life." Marty tries to laugh a little, to exorcise all that false panic and pain; it falls mostly flat. He's babbling and he knows it, but he can't seem to _stop_. "And even as far as fiction goes, I thought this was supposed to be a Greek mythology thing, not... scary campfire stories that you tell with a flashlight under your chin," Marty says, miming the gesture with one hand. 

"That might have been a little over the top," the voice admits, as Marty pushes himself upright with his other hand, tries to shake out the tension. "You're unusually resistant to straightforward terror."

Marty barks a short laugh, sincere for once. He runs both hands back through his hair. "I've been dealing with shit like that as long as I can remember. That wasn't even the worst nightmare I've ever had."

"You think you're brave, then?"

"I don't know," Marty says, rubbing blearily at his eyes, too tired for anything but honesty. "I hope so."

"Brave in the face of horror movie nightmares, but how about something more realistic? What will you do when you return home and find that he doesn't remember any of this?"

"I'll explain it to him, and he'll listen. It's always worked for us before."

A pause then, a silence that stretches ominously. 

"You think so?" the voice finally returns, sounding unbearably smug. "Try this one on for size, then."

Marty's expecting them to launch into another monologue, another faux-concerned warning, another carefully crafted word-bomb. He's mostly not paying attention, because the path is starting to flicker more severely, and he can't just stay where he is for much longer—so when the dissociation hits this time, eyes wide open, it's even more disorienting than it was the first time.

Okay—it's Doc's garage this time, still wrecked from what had happened, but at least the smell has faded as the blood's gone dry and mineralized. It's still enough to make Marty want to get up and run out, run until the nausea passes, but Doc's here, is sitting across from him in that ragged old brown armchair. Is picking at the tape holding the stuffing into the left armrest, is refusing to meet Marty's eyes.

"Come on, Doc," he says, without any conscious control, just as before. "You have to remember _something_."

"I'm sorry," Doc says, sounding like he's already said it a dozen times, knows that he's going to say it a dozen more. "I just don't remember. I don't know who I am, I don't know who you are… I don't think you're lying about any of this, but I don't _know you_."

Marty feels his chest clench up, feels the frustrated tears starting to gather. God, that hurts—that's the real nightmare possibility here, forget all the b-movie nonsense. This is the worst possible ending to the story.

And he feels his mouth opening, feels the scripted words that are about to come out— _why did I do this, I'm so sorry, I should have left you where you were_ —but possessed by a sudden burst of obstinacy, Marty fights them, hard. It hurts his head to do it, feels like he's being torn in two, but damn it, it's time to go off-script.

"It's okay," he manages, pure force of will. "We'll... figure this out, I…"

"But I don't—"

"We'll do this," Marty forces, through pain that's becoming unbearable. He wills his hand to move, to cross the gap between them; it hangs, shaking. "You don't remember, but I love you too much to—"

And like that, like a switch flipped, he's back in the grey, suddenly standing again instead of sitting and his equilibrium swings out wildly, trying to compensate. He stumbles forward a step, recovers, tries to catch his bearings.

"What do you think of that?" the voice asks, predictable.

_I don't think it's going to happen_ , Marty thinks, determined to make himself believe it. Because it could happen, it _could_ , but the only option left to him appears, at this point, to be blind, stupid faith.

Ahead of him, the path's jumping around, no longer just flickering. It's disappearing and reappearing now five feet to the left, now three feet to the right, like it can't decide where it wants to lead him. Watching it move is making him feel dizzy, like some kind of strobe effect, here and then gone and then here again, faster than instantaneous. 

_All these possible futures_ , he thinks, and then: _Believe in what you're doing, McFly._

He takes a step, and then another, tracking the path as best he can, anticipating where it should be, trusting himself not to go astray.

*

After a while, even that becomes impossible; the light is moving so quickly between different paths, like a wave function trying hard not to collapse (and where exactly did _that_ metaphor come from, Marty wonders; somewhere in the back of his head, there's a vibration that feels almost like laughter), that there's no discerning the right path from all the wrong ones.

Marty stops, considers. Feels the way the soles of his feet are tingling, have been tingling all this time. Notices how the sensation goes away when he lifts his foot from the ground.

Okay. Okay, no problem. He drops to his hands and knees, feeling around with his hands because they're supposed to be so much more sensitive, and yeah, there it is—a humming electric ley line, making his fingertips buzz and the hairs on the back of his wrist stand up. "There you are," he says, pushing down on the anxiety. "We're okay," he says, to himself or Doc, or both.

*

By the time the path finally flickers out completely, it almost doesn't matter. On his hands and knees, Marty makes his careful way forward, trusting the feeling of cold lightning under his fingers more than he trusts anything his eyes could tell him. It's still there, and he's still following it, and he can still hear the shuffling of someone following behind him. He can still feel the warmth of that illusory handhold in the back of his mind. They're okay. He just has to keep—

"Ooh," a voice says out of nowhere; it had been too much to hope for that they'd gone away. "Look what _you_ found. A way out! Maybe you aren't useless after all."

_Yeah, right,_ Marty thinks, but there'd been a sense of claustrophobia in this place that had transcended vision; he could feel it even with his eyes closed, the pressure of however many thousands of feet of earth, pressing in on him from the living world above. Now that feeling is gone, and there's a blur of pink-orange-red through his eyelids lending credence to the idea that yes, something has actually changed. He opens his eyes, pulls himself to his feet, and about fifty feet in front of him— 

Light. It's goddamned _sunlight_ , and Marty feels his face split in the biggest smile he's been able to muster in a long, _long_ time. He's done it— _they've_ done it. All those legendary figures couldn't manage it, but Marty— 

Marty stops, one foot already in the air. Something isn't right.

He sets his foot back down, narrows his eyes at the crack in the rockface, the place where all that light is spilling through like something out of a painting; the golden rays fall onto the ground in a haloed haze, inviting. But it's too easy. _Nothing_ in this place has been this easy.

Biting his lip, Marty drops back down onto his hands, closes his eyes against the light. Feels around, with his hands and his breath and that strange magnetic _something_ sparking in the back of his head, tries to find the path he's on. It's there, right beneath him, and once he's got the feel of it straight in his head again, starts moving slowly along it, a desperate scrambling that betrays how close he knows they are, if he can only be sure— 

The path takes a sharp left turn he isn't expecting, and then his hands abruptly run out of path to follow. Ground, too—one slips out into nothing, rocky surface scraping up his palm in a clattering shower of tiny stones. There's a terrifying moment where he feels himself start to tumble forward before he can pull the hand back, grab at the edge of the world, regain his balance. 

_Moving too fast_ , he thinks, opening his eyes to figure out what exactly just almost happened—and the terror floods back, ten times deeper and broader, because he's just narrowly avoided falling into what looks an awful lot like an _actual bottomless pit_. The sides are rough and rocky, but there's no handholds he can see, just a narrow constriction down and down with, presumably, a bone-shatteringly sudden stop at the end. 

He flexes his fingers against the rock, feeling the electric hum of the path under them, leading straight to the edge. There's no point in double-checking; it's obvious what he's supposed to do. Leap of faith, ha ha, very original. But it's terrifying—for all his talk about just staying here, the possibility of jumping into this hole and _actually dying_ is shaking something out of him now that really, desperately wants to _live_. 

It's the epiphany he was looking for at the ravine, he realizes. It also doesn't matter anymore.

He stands up, a little shaky, and looks at the light coming in from above, from up where he knows the living world is. The real world, where maybe not everything is bright and sunny all the time, where things are sometimes dark and terrifying, but at least you know it's _real_.

And Marty McFly is sick to death of illusions.

He takes a long, careful breath and leans over the edge, takes a good long look into the abyss—and of course, this is when the voices choose to chime in again, nearly startling him into a fall. 

"Do you know who we even are, boy?" They sound desperate now, like they're running out of ideas and are grasping for whatever they can find in the distant corners of Marty's mind. "We're the ones who tried and failed. You don't just get to go home, if you fail."

"I know," Marty says, voice a little wavery. "He told me already."

"Then you know that we failed because we did what you're planning," another pipes up, voice pained. "We could have just left, right through the rocks there, but we followed the path into that blasted hole."

"We trusted their word," says the first voice, and it's almost convincing; it's almost a good pitch. But it's way too late. If it were anything but a pack of lies, they would have said something about it sooner. Marty's been dealing with the voice of his own runaway panic for too many years to not recognize it when he hears it. "We didn't know when to stop hoping."

Marty ignores them, toes up to the edge of the hole. Looking down, he's hit by a wave of sickening vertigo.

This is a risk. This is a huge risk, is maybe suicide, but it also might really be the way out. He takes a breath, presses one hand flat over his own heartbeat—remembers falling into the ravine, remembers falling and falling ever since that Friday morning and he wonders—what will it be like to finally hit bottom?

"Are you just going to make the same mistake we did? Really?"

What would it be like to just go back to his normal life instead, a shadow of a life, knowing that if he'd just been a little braver, a little more willing to shoot for the moon, he might have been able to get his friend back?

"Even after we told you—"

" _Shut up_ , you _assholes_ ," Marty says, sharper than might be wise, but he suddenly doesn't care—doesn't care about their petty motivations, about what they're testing in him and why, about their made-up cautionary tales. He closes his eyes against the vertigo. "You can't just… no, look, I'm done with you. I've, I've earned two seconds to _think_ without having to listen to your shit, and I've earned _this_."

Shockingly, there's no response. There's no background tittering or quiet hum of discussion. The voices just _leave_ , and maybe that was all he ever had to do, but jesus he feels light suddenly, like a weight that's been pressing down between his shoulder blades for _miles_ has suddenly been lifted.

Marty could scream, could even laugh, but he doesn't have time for that. He can feel the warm hum of the path dissipating from under his feet, and he knows that he has to move, has to choose, before it vanishes completely. From somewhere nearby, he can hear the rushing of water, can smell something earthy and wet, like the bank of a river, and he knows: this is it.

And if words have so much power in this place...

"Doc, listen," he says, focusing hard on the steady thump under his palm. "I don't know for sure if you're really there, but if you are, I'm guessing you're probably _losing your mind_ right about now. I know you don't want me to do this—I mean, no shit, right? Of course you don't. But I need you to know that this is my choice and, and—"

He can feel something squeezing in his chest; more panic than he knows how to feel, more terror than one heart can hold. And his voice isn't behaving, breaking up all over itself, which means the words themselves are probably wrong—and he _can't get this wrong_.

A steadying breath. Slow down, back up, don't leave anything out. 

"You don't understand," Marty says, forcing the words out. "That when they killed you, they also killed probably _half_ of me, and I didn't even realize how tangled up in you I was until…" A short, humorless bark of laughter, breathy. "No. No, I think I knew, I just wasn't… and I mean, I was willing to take the half that was left and try to live with just that, because hey, it's what you wanted. But if I have the chance to bring you back for real, I, I _have to_ , Doc, I have to _try,_ I can't throw that away."

The anxiety is still there, rippling along the edges of his mind, and he doesn't know anymore who it belongs to. "Even if it is a risk. Even if it is _stupid_."

He risks another glance over the lip of the pit, and the darkness down there is so _complete_. It's like looking at the death entity itself, but it's also like the gate that got him here, opaque and inscrutable and leading who-knows-where. 

"This is a chance I'm okay with taking," he finally says, quiet, and there's nothing there but truth. He lifts his other hand, lays it across the first, takes a deep breath beneath them. His footing teeters a little, unsteady, and a fresh wave of fear lights up the back of his mind—and he tamps down on it, soothes it down and back with as gentle a touch as he can manage. "No, it's okay," he says, laughing a little again, and he's not sure he's ever laughed and cried at the same time before. He rubs at his eyes with the torn sleeve of his jacket, wrung out on all this desperation and misery and hope. "You know, I wanna get home, I want us _both_ to live. But more than anything, I _really_ don't want you blaming yourself for whatever comes next."

Silence, which is all he expects. It still doesn't make it any easier. "The shit with the plutonium's on you, and don't think for a second I'm ever gonna let you live that one down," he says, trying to smile through the fear. His face feels brittle. "But this one…yeah, this one's completely, a hundred percent on me."

Marty pinches his eyes shut, and takes a moment to feel the way he's teetering, the way every tiny muscle in his feet and ankles and legs are contracting in a coordinated dance to keep him upright. He thinks about his family and about the way Einstein's fur feels under his hand, about cut grass in the spring and citronella in the summer, cool autumn rain and that stillness in winter that feels like a held breath. He thinks about how nothing really stands still, how everything just keeps cycling around and around, and he tries to really feel his own heart beating, for what might be the last time. 

When he finally leans forward a little too far, feels his balance slide out from under him—when he lets gravity take him, toppling him into the future, no matter what it might turn out to be—it barely even feels like falling. It's more like floating, sinking through this airless void with nothing to tell him up from down or the end from the beginning, and maybe none of that even matters, maybe they'll be okay no matter what— 

_Oh,_ he realizes abstractly, falling and falling. _It's not a leap of_ faith _, it's—_

Then, lost in this in-between place where no one will ever find him, Marty feels his heart give a hard kick; it skips, a hollow emptiness blooming up inside of him. The panic flares: _no, please, i did what you said i didn't fail i want to save him i don't want us to die no please—_

_—this can't be happening don't let him die not for my sake not for me—_

Then there's a sudden snapback along the bond, an abrupt tightening that almost pulls him back (forward) like he's a dog on a leash that's gotten too far ahead (behind), and he no longer knows who's tied to who or how. But then the snap becomes a steady resistance, becomes nothing, all the tension in the connection giving way and going slack— 

And he knows that, for better or for worse, they're in this together.

* *

* *

* *

* *

When he wakes up this time—and he has been knocked unconscious far too many times in the last day and change—Marty finds himself blinking hazily up into the sharp yellow morning light. It's falling on him from somewhere far above, a narrow slit of daylight snaking across his vision, blowing out all the detail in the rocks and scrub brush around it.

Marty presses his eyes closed against it. It's too much, too bright to look at directly. Then he remembers that he has another reason for keeping them shut; panic floods his brain.

"Shit," he mutters, feeling around for something to grab onto, something he can use to help him right himself. A craggy bit of rock suffices; he manages to roll himself onto his hands and knees, determinedly ignoring the way his leg is complaining. A wave of dizziness rolls over him, nauseating, spinning the world on six different axes. "Oh, god."

Okay, so. He's either back in the ravine, or he's still on the path out. It had looked like the ravine in the second or two he'd spent gawping up at the daylight, and he can hear water bubbling nearby like the tiny ribbon of a river that he knows runs through it, but that could _easily_ be a trick. He has to figure out where...

That thought's interrupted by the sound, somewhere nearby, of a ragged gasp for breath—a sound that quickly dissolves into a violent coughing fit. It's rough and halting in a way that somehow makes Marty think about when his dad pulls the lawnmower out of winter storage every year, and the motor hasn't been _doing_ anything for a long time and now there's all these demands being placed on it— 

Oh. _Oh._

Marty almost stops breathing himself, then—with his heart so far up his throat, it's a wonder there's any room for air to get by at all. He scrambles forward on all fours, following the sound, ignoring the roughness of the terrain. Then the fit subsides, and Marty catches another wave of dizziness that turns him around a little; he strains to regain his bearings, but he can't hear anything over the pounding of blood in his ears.

"...Doc?" he calls out, disoriented and blind and riding on the dangerous, teetering edge of hope.

He can hear a rustling of fabric over rocky ground, a scuffing sound of shoes in the dirt. Then there are arms around him and Marty's being gathered up in an embrace that's so _familiar_ he could just die, and Doc's voice is in his ear, hoarse and creaky. "Oh thank goodness, Marty, I thought… don't listen to a word they said, do you understand? There is no one on this planet I would rather…"

He trails off, coughing a little, and Marty can feel breath in his hair even when Doc has stopped trying to talk—and he doesn't have words for how that makes him feel right now, not even in his own head. He just tightens his hold on Doc, presses closed eyes into his shoulder.

"...Marty?" that strained voice asks, and it sounds like talking hurts.

"Did we make it?" Marty asks regardless, because it's all too good to be true and he refuses to get his hopes up. He's thinking about the story, about all the stories, about how nothing in his life has ever just _worked out_. There's always a catch, to everything. "Are we safe?"

He can feel Doc nod against the side of his head; he can smell juniper and sun-baked dust and iron, the fabric of Doc's shirt strangely stiff where Marty has grabbed a handful of it. The details are all there, precise and unforgiving. "We're safe," Doc says, and the disbelief and raw relief in his voice have no place in any dream, waking or otherwise.

For a long moment, Marty just clings—he's not really able to process this, after a week of grief and such a surreal journey, never having intended to get anything out of it except maybe a chance to start recovering a little—and Doc doesn't argue, one hand buried in Marty's hair, pressing him close. Then, gradually, Marty pulls back, face dipped, eyes still closed. He takes a breath, then another, preparing to finally look in the damn box—but he can't do it.

"Marty?" Doc asks, worry blooming around the words. Hands clutch his shoulders, careful. "You can open your eyes, we're okay."

Marty feels a fine tremor in the hands on him, fear or adrenaline, or both. "I'm scared," he admits, shaking his head. "It could be a trick, I could screw everything up, I always—"

"You haven't screwed this up yet, Marty," the voice says, quiet, almost reverent. "You're not going to start now."

Marty nods, biting his lip hard. Doc's right, of course—he's never going to be more certain than he is now, and he can't keep his eyes shut forever. It's time to face the truth. Silencing his anxiety as forcefully as he can, Marty takes another shaking breath, and looks up.

The face he sees, shadowed a little by the sunlight coming from above them, is the face he _knows_ —and it's a mess, dried blood streaked into Doc's hair and flaking from his skin, but the hair is white and soft where it isn't dirtied, lifting in a flyaway mess even now, and every laugh line and frown line and all of the other marks a well-lived life leaves on a person are where they should be. His eyes are pitch-dark in the limited light, but so wide and questioning, so alive, and Marty feels such a rush of tenderness and affection that he can't _stand_ it.

_This is real_ , his brain informs him numbly. _You really got him back. You brought him back from the_ dead _, holy shit._

His hand moves of its own volition, settling on the side of Doc's face in a mirror of Doc's gesture from before, and Doc stares steadily back at him and Marty has just enough time to recognize the giddy, goading voice of his own subconscious before he realizes what exactly it's up to. Then he's leaning up and in— 

_And now you can start living again._

—and maybe it's not the best kiss in the world, because he's still dizzy and Doc's still struggling for breath and taken a little bit by surprise. But it's got all the desperation and longing in it of a week's awful separation, of months of useless pining, of years of knowing that no one else in his life would ever be this important. 

Then what exactly he's doing sinks in, all the possible implications and interpretations plucking at his doubts like guitar strings, and Marty breaks away, face dropping. "Um. Sorry. I know that isn't something you wanna deal with right now, you just _got back_ , and it's not like that's why I came after you, I mean—" 

Doc blinks a few times, trying hard to keep up. "Marty," he says, voice still rough.

"I wasn't trying to—"

_"Marty,"_ Doc says again, this time reaching up to touch Marty's mouth in what might ordinarily be a silencing gesture if it weren't so tender, pad of his thumb tracing the curve of Marty's lip. Marty shuts up anyway, sucking in a sharp breath. "It's fine."

Then Doc leans in a little, replacing the touch with a chaste, gentle kiss; it's less a promise than it is a reassurance, that this is all _okay_ , that this new knowledge has not ruined things between them, that no matter what else happens or what anyone has to say about it, they are _okay_.

"Are you sure, uh," Marty says into the narrow space between them, "that this isn't because I—I mean, you don't _owe_ me anything here, Doc…"

"Don't be ridiculous," Doc says, smiling against the side of Marty's face. "I think it's fairly plain that I owe you my _life_." A pause, careful and deliberate. "But nothing between us has ever involved obligations before. I see no reason to change that." 

"Doc, I…" Marty trails off, unsure what he should even be protesting.

Doc shakes his head a little, partially negation, partially trying to get his equilibrium where it needs to be; he seems disoriented, weaving a little unsteadily. "You'll forgive me if…" he says, trailing off into a cough. 

Marty's eyes widen in a fresh rush of panic. "Hey, hey Doc. Are you okay?"

Doc waves a hand; it's nothing, the gesture says. "Later. It'll probably be a _long_ conversation, and I don't... think my voice is up to it just yet."

He gets to his feet, still unsteady but helping Marty to do the same with one long, two-handed tug. "We have to get back to civilization before… Great Scott, is it afternoon already?" he asks, squinting up at the sunlight. "Your family will be in an uproar."

Ah, crap. And afternoon on which _day_? And how exactly are they going to _explain_ all of this, to anyone? Marty plasters over the sudden burst of anxiety with a nervous flutter of laughter. "I, uh, I never thought I'd see you not knowing what time it is, Doc."

Doc just grimaces a little, holds both hands up to Marty, wrist sides out, and… oh, okay. Yeah. Both the watches are smashed, beyond useless. But it's the first time Marty's really taken his eyes off Doc's face and gotten a real look at the rest of him, and oh man, it doesn't stop with the watches. His hands are caked in old blood and canyon dust, the fabric of his Hawaiian shirt ruined with it and punched through with holes. Marty recalls, in a detached sort of way, that that was one of Doc's favorites.

"Uhhhh," Marty attempts, suddenly dizzy again, vision fraying at the edges.

"I know," Doc says, looking down at himself with a disapproving head-shake. "I'm sorry. It's as distressing to me as... as it is to you, but there's nothing I can do about it until we… Marty?"

It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for all the holes, Marty thinks. Or if he hadn't suddenly remembered that no, it wasn't _Doc's_ favorite shirt, but rather _his_ —because it was the one Doc had been wearing when they'd first met. Meeting, parting, they're like bookends—reverse the picture and you can't tell the difference. 

"Marty, are you—" 

He can't pass out, not here at the bottom of the ravine and not while he's already got one head injury to deal with. He tells himself that, angry and insistent, as he starts to teeter: _You can't pass out_. 

But it doesn't do any good, and the next thing Marty knows he's got an arm threaded behind his back, a solid strength for him to sag against. It's so familiar he could cry, but there's no time for that; he has to get his shit together, because they have to get out of here, he has to _help Doc_ get out of here, and…

"Whoa, whoa," Marty says, trying to squirm out of the hold. "I'm the one that's supposed to be helping you, right? Don't you need help?"

Doc's not having any of this; he just hauls Marty in closer, solidifies his grip. "You'd think so. But I suspect there's a lot of adrenaline in my system right now, whereas you seem to have run out of that particular resource."

"Oh, god," Marty half-moans, half-laughs. "Have I ever."

"Are you all right otherwise?" Doc asks, leaning to study him. "I'm still concerned about that head wound, now that we're back in a place where physics and reality actually apply."

"I think so?" Marty lifts a hand, touches his hair; it's still stiff and dry. "No new bleeding anyway. I think that's a good sign."

"No bleeding that we can see."

Yeah, well, there's that. But the seriousness of the concern doesn't want to connect, and Marty laughs a little, all his tact draining out with what's left of his strength. "Hey, if I die of a concussion or whatever, at least you know what to do."

He laughs again, notices that Doc isn't laughing with him. Is regarding him with such a sad, worried gaze that the laughter turns in on itself in an instant, threatens to bleed into the first hysterical threads of a breakdown, because oh _god_ , what are they going to _do_? Nevermind explaining this to his parents; Doc's house is covered in blood and police tape and Einstein is still missing and somewhere out there, those terrorists are still at large and armed and obviously willing to kill and…

"Marty, look at me," Doc says from one side.

...and what did he think was going to happen, once he got them free? Everything would just go back to how it had been? Back to a carefree, worry-free life of tinkering and playing with his guitar and sneaking treats to Einey, homework help on the weekends, college applications, all night movie marathons?

"Marty, _please._ "

Marty tries, he really does, but he sweeps his eyes along the ground first on the way to Doc's face and with the sun hitting the rocks, he can see all the rusty discoloration that isn't supposed to be there—can finally understand what he's seeing, this reddened scrawl on the narrow riverbank.

"Doc," he says, weakly, still staring out over the dirt. "Why are we—"

"Ignore it," Doc says sharply, taking Marty's face in both hands, turning it towards his own; his eyes are a lifeline. "Focus, Marty. We need to get out of here. Do you know a way up?" 

"Uhhhh. Yeah. Wait." Marty turns, casts over the landscape, looking for… right. There it is. He raises one hand vaguely in the direction of the little trail, barely a goatpath this far down. It's the same one he'd fallen off of, from considerably higher up. "Right there, I think."

"Okay," Doc says, and all this talking really is putting strain on him; his voice sounds shredded. He shoulders Marty more solidly upright, starts them walking in that direction. "What time _is_ it, Marty?" he asks, and maybe there's a good reason for them to know, but Marty figures it's more just a distraction, something to keep him from freaking out any more than he already is. Which hey, no problem, Marty can live with _not having a full blown panic attack at the bottom the ravine_ , so— 

"Huh, weird," he says, peering at the display of his watch; he can feel the strangeness of what he sees grounding him. "It's stopped at 10:04, but the display's still on? So it's not _broken_ , I don't think. Just frozen."

Silence, then, as they both consider this, and countless other things. The watch will probably end up disassembled at some point, pieces scattered across a lab bench, but Marty has the feeling it won't give up any answers.

"So, morning still," he finally says, because maybe after everything he's just seen and done, it's time to start just accepting some of these things. Maybe there's something of the extraordinary that he's never going to shake. Maybe…

A cold spot rubs against the back of his neck. Clara's pin. 

"Hold on," Marty says, twisting to look around again, around and _up_ this time, looking for a ledge, a specific one. There are so many, but he knows the right one when he sees it, jutting out just a bit more prominently, limned a little more brightly in the morning light. "There," he says, pointing, not even sure why except that he wants Doc to see it too, to understand. 

For a moment, he's just looking up, and the climb seems impossible, overwhelming, insane—then there's a shift in the light and he could swear there was a figure standing there, looking down at them both, watching over them.

"Doc," he says, breathless. "Are you seeing this?"

"Yes, I am." Doc sounds just as awed as he is. "Is that…?"

"Yeah," Marty says, lifting one hand in a wholly inadequate wave, smiling so hard it hurts. "It is." 

A faint motion as the figure waves back to him, and it's a farewell—for now, for now. But not forever.

Marty reaches behind himself, works the pin free from his collar, holds it up in the sunlight. It'd been broken, when he found it, but now it looks practically new. He leans down to set it on a nice clean rock that's bathed in sun, hesitating for just a second before it leaves his fingers. 

_It'll find its way back to me eventually,_ she'd said, laughter in her voice, in her fingertips, pushing Marty forward into his future. _Just make it worth the regret._

"I think we're gonna be okay," he says, leaning in against Doc's side, letting his friend's warmth settle around him—watching the pin glint and sparkle in the sunlight.

* * *

Art by the amazing [Edgebug](http://edgebugart.tumblr.com/)


End file.
